“Chess Doctor – My friend mentioned to me that he likes to play ‘four-player chess’ in his free time. I assumed that this is some kind of variant on the game that I hadn’t heard of. I’m wondering how many such chess variants there are?“
Typically, chess variants are played for a change of scenery, and they can be a fun way to blow off steam. There are a great number of them, but I will do my best to catalogue them in their entirety.
First of all, four player chess was mentioned in the original question. This could be referring to one of two variants. It is one of the names that bughouse can be known by (see below), but it is also an independent game of its own. Four player chess combines four differently colored sets of pieces, with four participants each taking charge of one army. In this variant there is also the option for players to divide into teams of two, with the goal of defeating both members of the opposing team.
Crazyhouse and bughouse are in the same family of variants. In both of them pieces captured are stored in the player’s arsenal and can be placed back on the board at any moment, with the only limitation that pawns can’t be dropped on the first or eighth ranks. In crazyhouse, however, the game is played between two players as in normal chess. Bughouse, on the other hand, has two separate boards and two separate teams who give their captured pieces to their partner, who can subsequently place them on the board as in crazyhouse.
In his later years, Bobby Fischer longed for a game in which the typical played-out opening theory of regular chess did not apply. So, in his later years he advocated the play and practice of Fischer-Random (or Chess960) wherein the pieces on the bank rank are shuffled randomly. The only stipulations are that the king needs to be between two rooks, and both sides must have two differently colored bishops. Other instances where players at the top level have tried their hand at popularizing variants have been Kramnik’s No-Castling chess (which is self-evident), or Kasparov’s Centaur Chess, in which both players are allowed computer assistance. Nowadays this would only lead to many dull draws, but back then it showed some promise. In this category, Yasser Seirawan’s “Seirawan Chess” also deserves mention.
In King of the Hill, the only difference to normal chess is that once one side’s king reaches the four middle squares (e4, d4, e5, or d5), the game is over. Three-Check, similarly, has no major differences, apart from the fact that should one side give three checks to the opposing king, the game is decided in their favor. Anti-Chess (or giveaway chess, suicide chess, etc.) has the same board setup, with the difference that any piece under attack must be captured, and that the first player to give away all of their pieces wins the game.
One other variant that I have found quite interesting and particularly challenging is progressive (or Scottish) chess, where white moves once, black moves twice, white responds with three turns, and so on until the game is concluded. There are far too many variants to list here, and thus I have taken the liberty of only giving attention to those that are fairly popular and which I had some knowledge of previously. A complete list of chess variants can be found here, for those interested in further research.
I hope this helps answer the original question! As always, you’re welcome to submit a question of your own by clicking the button below or going to https://grandmaster2b.com/chess-doctor/
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