pchess is yet another chess variant to be played on a hexagonal lattice.
While not being fundamentally different than some other variants, it was specifically designed for games involving three (or more) players while trying to keep as close as possible to the original chess rules.
Due to the way it was designed, pchess adds more depth to the temporal dimension of a chess game, while also increasing the DOF in the spatial dimension.
While the author recognizes Gliński's hexagonal chess variant is more suited for two-player mode (that is, if you really want to play hex chess) mostly because of the limited size of the board, for three-player mode it seems obvious that pchess is closer to traditional chess while still retaining the ability to include more than two players in a single game and on a single board.
Standard player colors are:
- white
- black
- zebra
The initial order is arbitrary and determined by the clock itself, once players have chosen their color (like they would in standard chess, only there are only two hands and one color is "dropped" behind the back of the referee1.
When more than threee players are involved, a player's color (or color combination) is chosen so that all participants in the game have no trouble making the difference between each player. This may include clues such as Braille symbols, sound clues, or whatever else.
Cell numbering is done on a redundant three-axis scale. There are basically an infinite way to refer to a specific cell, but any cell coordinate will always have a unique solution in the form of (x;y;0).
There should (TODO) be a little snippet that converts any arbitratry coordinate triplet to it's unique, canonical (x;y;0) form.
When involving more then two players, pchess must be played with a clock (standard chess clocks are not suited) ; it is always the player who has the most time left on their clock whose turn it is to play, unless that player just finished a turn. The initial playing order is determined by the clock in a pseudo-random fashion.
There are a variety of possible board setups and variations, my favorite is shown below and features three bishops and three knights for a very dynamic gameplay. The starting position is edge-based and differs only mildly from that of standard chess : the backline is unchanged, the frontline only accepts another bishop (which can do no direct attack on any opponent), and theere is an optional "general" knight that adds lock-points so that it's basically better to never move (but really this is still chess so you have to move at one point or another).
By reducing the number of pieces used, it is possible to accomodate up to 6 (or even 12) players in a massive free-for-all warfare (with or without alliances).
The manual/ directory contains more info of piece movement and board setups.
Since - beyond the aspect of the clock itself - the start position is not exactly relevant, it is totally accepted that Gliński, McCooey, or Shafran variants may coexist on the same board.
Brusky and Vasa variants are excluded, bacause the arrangement of pieces does not match the board size.
Basically happens when as pawn goes further than "half" the board (at least 8 cases, see sectors in manual.
As there are a few variants of initial board setups, there also are a number of win conditions. Players can chose to declare the first player to get another in checkmate to be the winner, or it may be decided that the last playing remaining on the play field wins.
This must be decided at the game start, just like the allowed movement of knights and pawns in particular.
Alice, Bob and Charles are playing a game. Each player starts with 5 minutes (300 seconds) of time available.
- Bob starts, executes his move in 5 seconds.
- Alice comes next, and moves in 15 seconds.
- It's now Charles' turn ; however, he's feeling confident (and mabye somewhat distracted) so he choses to go make himself a cup of tea and comes back at the table 3 minutes later, having only 120 seconds left on his clock.
- Since bob has now 10 more seconds available than Alice, he gets to play.
- Then it's Alice's turn, because she definitely still has more time on her clock than Charles
- After comes Bob's turn (he also definitely has more time than Charles), then Alice, and Bob, and Alice, then Bob again and so on until either one of them drops his time below the 120 seconds mark, when Charles will finally be able to play.
If the above description of events may seem a little silly, it is because it is. There are, however, cases where a player who is satisfied with his position on the board and wishes to stay there a little while might willingly chose to play somewhat slower than usual in order to force another player's turn. Or may start to panic when they realize they are playing too slow and being more observers than contestants.
Since clocks are fairly difficult to make, and fancy clocks with multiple mechanisms, random number generators and all the little gizmos inside are even more difficult to build, a simple python program was written to achieve a similar result.
At the moment, it uses pyGame but that may change in the future
- supports any number of players (including 2)
- player names can be specified
- packaging for Android, IOs (maybe use Kivy?)
- handicap feature : players time credit can be individually specified, it is normalized to preserve a reasonnable playing order
- player colors
- Pause does not really work, barely good enough to wait for all players to be ready to start the game
- re-order player names (current player on top, next player second, then sort by decreasing time credit)
Footnotes
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or whoever is holding the pieces when player chose their role ; history has shown that this little detail can be dealt with even when two players are competing against each other without any bloodshed or international scandals so we will stick with this. The referee takes three pawns (one of each color), mixes them behind their back, drops one, keep one i nthe left hand and one in the right hand so that one player can chose their color. ↩