Grant Acedrex
This large chess variant played on a 12x12 spaces board is found in a medieval Spanish codex (a form of ancient book) known as "Juegos diuersos de Acedrex, dados, y tablas con sus explicaciones, ordonados por mandado del rey don Alfonso el Sabio"(Various games of Chess, Dice and Tables with their explanations, ordered by request of King Alfonso the Wise). This king was Alfonso X (1221-1284), King of Castile, the central kingdom of Spain in Middle Ages. Author and poet, he compiled many books. This one was completed in 1283 in Seville, and is conserved at El Escorial near Madrid, it represents the most important extant testimony about games in the Middle Ages. Within 98 pages, it describes, details and comments many rules and problems for several games.
This game has been (very briefly) described by H.J.R. Murray in his monumental "History of Chess" (1913, page 348). Then, his description has been re-used by other subsequent authors like John Gollon (1968), D.B. Pritchard (1994) or David Parlett (1999). The description available on this Chess Variants page was made accordingly with that information. However, as often with Murray, who had a moderate interest with chess variants, there are some inacuracies or misinterpretations.
The complete text of the Alfonso's codex written in medieval Spanish has been studied Sonja Musser and this author in the context of Sonja Musser's PhD. The original medieval Spanish text as well as the English translation made by Sonja Musser and I are available on this web site. With this original source, it appears that Murray's description had few incorrect statements and that it is worth to make an updated description of that game.
The original name of this game as written on the codex is Grant Acedrex. Murray used a different orthograph for the the adjective and wrote Grande Acedrex. It appears that the orthograph was not well stabilized as in our modern era and the form "grande", which is also the form used in modern Spanish, is found at
Setup
IN CONSTRUCTIONPieces
IN CONSTRUCTION For every piece we give the original name in Spanish.Rules
IN CONSTRUCTIONNotes
A Game Courier preset enforcing the rules and following presented here has been proposed by Daniel Zacharias. Here the link.
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Author: Jean-Louis Cazaux.
Last revised by Jean-Louis Cazaux.
Web page created: 2023-12-02. Web page last updated: 2023-12-04