Ava Jarvis: Exploring the Ancient Variation Machine

This is how I used to open my chess games.  I think of it as the “Questionable Queen’s Gambit”:

1. e4           e5
2. d4           d6
3. d4xe5?       d6xe5??
4. QxQ

I’m never quite sure why some people thought that no one would trade queens at the beginning of the game, so they played along to avoid losing time “needlessly” moving the queen out of danger.  And they usually lost, not being used to having the queen taken so suddenly.  I didn’t know it at the time, but what I was doing was turning back the clock to a much older variant: no Queens, and no castling.  Well… no castling for my opponent anyways.

Eventually, chess fell by the wayside for me.  The strategy of the game is very deep, but you have the same pieces, same board, same starting position, even same mission of checkmate every single time.  I wasn’t a chess gamer, someone who will mull over different possible developments given the same initial variables every time.  They find treasure; I only got rocks.  So I stopped playing.

A few years later, in college, I discovered chess variants---not variations for openings, which is one definition of the term, but entirely different games that come from the single trunk of Chess. 

I didn’t realize the full ramifications of this at first but this discovery changed how I thought about chess.  Suddenly, chess was not merely the official modern FIDE rules.  Chess was an expanding world of possibilities, an entire spectrum of rules and pieces and boards, spanning from logic to chaos.  Variants are an exhilarating freedom from the confines of the traditional game.

Still, chess variants get a bad rap, from both sides of the fence---the chess-lovers and the non-chess-lovers.  (Much as I would like to, I don’t think I can introduce the term “chesser” and “non-chesser”.) Non-chess-lovers sometimes don’t know enough about the variant spectrum---they think that there isn’t possibly that much you can do with the idea of chess.  And chess-lovers may (and often do) hate variants because they can destroy well-known openings and other traditional stratagems.  This situation amuses me to no end, because non-chess-lovers would love variants for the exact reasons that chess-lovers hate them..... as well as because a chess-lover must realize that the soul of the game is positional play , not by-rote memorization of openings.  Variants are an exercise in flexibility for both sides.

I first started reading about chess variants in New Rules for Classic Games.  I was astounded that two of the most revered chess masters---Capablanca and Lasker---had worked on a chess variant that they ended up liking better than the original game.  The Chess Variant Pages refers to this developing game as Capablanca’s Chess.  The board is larger and features two more types of major pieces---one that combines the move of rook and knight, and the other that combines the move of bishop and knight.  Freeling’s Grand Chess is generally considered an additional improvement because of the change in initial setup:

From the beginning, Grand Chess is already more open than the traditional game.  The addition of two major piece types is also welcome. 

This is all very nice, but I wanted to see how far you could go with chess.  Discovering these games alone was definitely heading in an interesting direction.

Of course, there is not just Western chess, but there are also other regional chess games.  In the Chinese game of Xiangqi, a river separates the two armies, and only some pieces can cross it.  The game is named for the elephant piece, but it’s the Canon that’s most unorthodox to me---it moves without capturing as a rook, but when capturing can only do so by hopping over another piece to get at a piece beyond it.  I recall, but cannot find again, another regional game that involved a hidden initial set-up of both armies (with an initial shape that looks a bit like Freeling’s Grand Chess, without the large boardsize). 

And then there’s Shogi, which I tend to think of as a historically rich area for finding variants.  The simplicity of a Shogi piece---an iconic kanji character on a directional lozenge with a specific promotion path on its other side---will naturally lead to creating all kinds of pieces.  Today there are small, themed variants like Tori Shogi---or Bird Shogi---with its left-quail and right-quail pieces that accompany an army of swallows and cranes, lead by a Phoenix.  And in the past there were enormous Shogi variants, from Chu Shogi (12x12) to Tai Shogi (25x25) and even larger (like Taikyoku shogi on a 36x36 board).  Larger boards housed successively larger bestiaries of pieces: Drunken Elephants, Blind Tigers, Ferocious Leopards, Diving Falcons, Ki’rin, etc.

My most favorite piece is the Lion from Chu Shogi, which I would prefer over a chess queen on any day.  It doesn’t have the range of a queen, but a piece that can jump (if it wants to, rather than being forced to like the knight), capture without moving, pass, or even capture two pieces in one move---that’s a powerful piece.  Wisely in Chu Shogi they restrict Lion trades.

Looking forwards to the modern age, chess variants just get weirder and weirder.  It’s wonderful.  The stranger it is, the more I like it.  Some samples from the spectrum:

Extinction Chess turns the concept of checkmate on its head; winning now means being able to eliminate all a particular “species” of piece from your opponent’s army: losing both knights is now as disastrous as a checkmated king.  The winning condition (or, more accurately, losing condition) leads to the interesting case of promoting yourself to extinction, if that was your last pawn (promotion is forced in this game).  The game becomes very bloody and thus very accessible.  There’s also Racing Kings, where both kings start at one end of the board and must migrate to the other with the help of a small army---but the additional wrinkle is that the kings cannot be placed into check (though pieces can still capture each other).  The result is a very quick racing game.  It’s no surprise that both games are among the first you read about in New Rules for Classic Games. 

If you are bored with the same board (ha ha), you could try changing the grid (hexagonal chess, of which there are over 70 variants registered at the Chess Variant Pages), or even the geometry of the board (multiple variants exist for cylindrical chess and for circular chess).  The most accessible chess games of this type, I think, have no board at all---such as Hive, where the “board” is defined purely by the neighboring spaces of a connected “hive” of pieces, and Chex and Tile Chess, where the “board” grows and shrinks based on the grid location of your pieces at the time.  And then there is the ultimate experience of three-dimensional chess, which is one of the few game genres that truly captures the feeling of moving through a volume rather than just across a plane.  It’s not just Star Trek chess, with its small moving platforms that create dynamic half-levels, but also the five-mini-board Raumschach or 3D Hook-Move Chess (which perhaps most elegantly solves the problem of translating movement from 2d to 3d with the use of hook-moving pieces).  You could even consider Alice Chess to be a sort of multi-dimensional variant, in the sense that you end up with pieces moving in separate parallel dimensions which can still affect each other.

Exploring the aptitude of different pieces as opposed to the traditional ones is, I think, the most worthy ambition where chess variations are concerned.  I was always a fan of fairy chess, the creation and study of unusual chess pieces.  A small sampling from a collection of hundreds of fairy chess pieces: Grasshoppers, which can move any number of squares in any direction, like queens, but can only move at all by jumping over a piece; the Joker which moves like the last piece your opponent moved; variants on the length of the Knight’s move (Camel, Zebra, and the all-encompassing Buffalo); and others still stranger. 

The attraction of other-worldly pieces is very strong; strong enough to create the themed Dragonchess, which is not the registered trademark “Dragon Chess” from Dragon Chess Inc., but a large three-dimensional chess-variant from the inventor of AD&D (surprising or not, depending on your point of view).  Unlike other three-dimensional variants, there’s not just a wide variety of pieces, but each level has a different meaning which affects how a piece moves.  The top level is the sky, and only flying pieces can move there, in graceful arcs and lines though they tend to end up clumsy on the middle board, which is the earth.  The lower board is the Underworld, which cannot be traveled to by some pieces, and either restricts or expands the power of pieces that do enter it (or even start in it).  Whether this particular variant is balanced is questionable, but it is very complex and thematic, rather like a “real” wargame.

There is another take on the usage of fairy chess pieces that perhaps shows where some of the most wide-appealing variations can show up: constructed chess, or chess with different army constitutions.  So far, Chess with Different Armies has three different equally strong constructions (not counting the original “Fabulous Fide"), but there are many other such variants for chess with unequal armies, including other army constructs.  I must admit to being tickled by names such as “Colorbound Clobberers”, “Remarkable Rookies”, and the proposed “Fighting Fizzies”.  The idea of building armies (complete with territories as well as a modular way to represent chess pieces of all sorts) is presented in the Chess-like Variant Construction Toolkit.

I like best how Navia Dratp solves the problem of unequal armies: through the introduction gathering resource points through moving pawns and capturing other pieces.  Gathered resources are used to pay for the promotion of initial pieces (most of which start out weak).  The more powerful the promotion of a piece, the more it costs.  And strong pieces captured by your opponent of course lead to more resource points for them.  This idea of being able to “flip a switch” leads to more interesting piece powers on the meta-level of the fairy Joker: remote destruction of pieces on promotion (which usually also destroys your own piece), the ability to immobilize an opponent’s piece or even the ability to summon other pieces nearby or even back from the dead.  Not all of the Navia Dratp sculpts will please everybody, and it is collectible… but since the most important part of the game is what the pieces actually do rather than how they look, referring to the official piece list is enough to get a taste of the game and even to play.

And then there’s Gess, which I’m not sure how to categorize.  It’s chess on a Go board, where 3x3 sections contain stones that indicate what directions a piece moves and how far.  But since the 3x3 sections can be taken at any point in the grid, you can construct and deconstruct pieces on the fly.  It’s very strange and very “meta”.  I like it, but it is awfully fiddly.

The utter chaos at one end of the spectrum is best represented by Faidutti’s “Tempete sur l’Echiquier”, reprinted in English as “Knightmare Chess” (although the true translation of the title is “Storm on the Chessboard").  Ideas are new or come from any number of variants, and go into effect whenever a card is played.  Playing a game of Knightmare Chess is perhaps a nightmare for chess lovers, but for someone like me---I prefer to ride the tempest and see what happens.

Recently, I have been enjoying more games of Heroscape than are perhaps healthy for me, just in terms of concentrating solely on one game, something that doesn’t fit me.  At one point, thinking and reading about strategy and the ideal usage of the special powers of the figures, and the different terrain, and on and on… I wondered whether I was, perhaps, just playing another chess variant.  When I think about all the variants that exist, there is little that separates Heroscape, the C&C series, or block games from chess variants.  I actually started arguing with myself that the rules of chance are almost exclusive and much more important in a wargame, and then realized that the argument was merely a quibble in the face of variants such as AAUUGHH! Chess, Turncoat Chess, and chess with Nuclear Pawns.  Nevertheless, the differences between “real” wargames and any form of chess are still in the amount of abstraction---although some chess variants come much closer to others to breaking the “abstraction barrier”.

I believe that chess variants deserve a much wider audience than they currently receive.  There’s more than enough variants to find something for everybody.  If you think about it, there’s even already some commercially successful variants---Storm on the Chessboard/Knightmare chess is Bruno Faidutti’s best-selling creation.  On a smaller scale, there’s Hive, Proteus, Tile chess, perhaps Navia Dratp (although I’m not sure how long it will survive, even though it has the most potential).  But there is more out there---and it’s a space worth exploring.

Peace,
Ava

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