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Besiege Chess. Double height chess board, where black is surrounded by white. (8x16, Cells: 128) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The rating is for the way of accommodating large armies. Further piece types could easily be brought in by substituting for two aside of some FIDE piece types. Marshal and Cardianl for Queens would be one obvious substitution not requiring much more marking than the game shown, and with two highly distinguishable sets there could be up to 12 pieces types.
'ABCLargeCV': This is notionally like today's Back-to-Back Chess in being a different array here doubled. Gilman thinks it has merit, but Black is disadvantaged by centralized King.
I can't rate the game as written; it looks great, but I haven't played it. I just want to add that my personal group of Chess dorks got together for some Bughouse only to have one member fail to show. Left with three players, we decided to try Besiege Chess as a three-player game instead: white, black, and yellow (another color we happened to have on hand). White and yellow both had orthodox sets, while black retained it's double set and three queens. Each player got one move per round, going in the order white, black, yellow. The resulting game was amazing. It was like a cross between Chess and Diplomacy. Black was initially savaged by the two-front war, but things changed rapidly when white and yellow realized that whoever expended more resources destroying black would likely lose to the other. It became a protracted and exciting battle, with players sometimes declining to take opposing rooks or queens of one side because the position they were in gave them an advantage over, or at least temporarily distracted, the other. There were double-checks, in which a piece from one army would check both enemy kings at once. There was an instance in which one king found himself in check from both other players. We conceived of scenarios in which one player could inadvertently assist in the checkmate of another by the third. The first checkmated player had all his pieces removed from the board to allow the others to finish. Next time, however, we plan to have it so that the player who captures another's king gets control of his remaining pieces. This will encourage more aggression and discourage turtling. It was great fun. Thanks to the author of Besiege Chess for giving us the idea.
Hi, Joshua: That's typical of three-player games, that the two weaker players will gang up on the stronger until things start to equal out, then it's every man for himself. I made a Chess for Three game (in the index here) using three equal standard teams, that works quite well, which you might like, and which frequently produces some of the fun phenomena you mentioned in your 3-way Besiege game.
It occurs to me that a 3-player Besiege Chess with equal armies could very easily be achieved on a suitably adjusted board. One would be to have three FIDE arrays stuck together - Red v Yellow, Red v Blue, and Yellow v Blue, say, with one put in the middle and its camps joined to the same-colour ones on the other boards, and one King turned to a Queen for each player. If this looks too grotesquely large, another possibility is to join two boards but remove the file a/b/g/h squares from the middle 4 ranks. In the latter case I would recommend the middle army having the first move to make up for being attacked on two fronts by two armies each internally united.
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Oct 22, 2022 08:51 AM UTC:The Diagram's AI doesn't seem to play so well. I guess it doesn't recognize the 'inverted' Pawns as Pawns, and thus sees no reason to develop in the upper part of the board. The fact that black is already happy with how well centralized his pieces are to begin with also doesn't provoke him into much action.
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