Scacchic Variants Trivia Quiz

Answer: India

Chaturanga was an ancient board game, which, as best as we can tell, arose in India during the 6th Century under the Gupta Empire. The name "chaturanga" derives from an Indian word meaning "having four parts," referring to the elephants, chariots, cavalry, and infantry of the game.

The board itself was not checkered, but sometimes had special markings whose purpose is no longer known. The rules of Chaturanga are not fully known any more, but are probably similar to its Persian successor, Shatranj (from which we got chess).

Answer: on the intersections of the board's lines

Xiangqi is believed to be the result of Shatranj travelling into China, though it is markedly different from western and even southeast Asian scacchic games. Of particular note is that the pieces are played on the intersections of the lines rather than the squares themselves, resulting in a 9x10 board size. Xiangqi features 7 different pieces (16 total), separated by a river and featuring palaces.

Many of the pieces have very limited moving power, and the chariots (which move like rooks) are the strongest pieces.

Answer: after they are captured, they become part of the other player's army

Shogi, Xiangqi, and Western (International) Chess make up the great bulk of chess games that people play, and together form the Classic tier of scacchic games. Shogi is a Japanese game, played on a 9x9 board with 20 pieces per side. Pieces indicate their allegiance by the direction in which they point. Captured pieces can be added to a player's side by dropping them on the board, which is why they do not have marks that differentiate opposing players' pieces. Promoted pieces are flipped over, and are sometimes "marked" with red writing, but that does not indicate the piece's allegiance.

Shogi itself has many variants. Taikyoku Shogi is played on a 36x36 board with 402 pieces per player, making it by far the largest scacchic game ever created.

Answer: four players

Bughouse requires two pairs of players to play (though it can be played with more!). In this scacchic game, you pass any pieces you capture to your partner, who can then drop one on any square instead of making a move that turn. Pawns normally are not allowed to promote in Bughouse.

The chaotic nature of this game is how it gained the name Bughouse, from a perjorative word for an insane asylum. The ability to drop pieces on the board makes it easy to block long-distance checks, and makes it more important to seal in an opponent's king to end the game.

Answer: Eastern Europe

Hexagonal Chess is usually played on a hexagonal board with hexagonal tiles. One of the older and probably most popular versions was invented Wladyslaw Glinski in Poland in 1936. The 91 tiles on the board are separated into three different colors, and thus there are three bishops per side. Each side also starts with nine pawns due to the rather large board.

The pieces move as regular chess pieces do, but adapted to the hexagonal tiling. In order to move diagonally, a piece moves in the direction of a tile of the same color that it resides on, passing through the middle of two tiles of the other two colors.

Answer: the positions of all back row pieces

Random-style chess positions have been tried for centuries, but Bobby Fischer's version has been the most popular of them. He invented it in the early 1990s because he thought there was far too much emphasis on memorization for opening moves, and not enough creativity. All pieces move as they do in a standard chess game, but are randomly positioned before the game, with some restrictions.

The pieces of both players mirror each other. There are 960 different starting positions possible under the rules, and the game is sometimes called Chess960.

Answer: Los Alamos National Laboratory

The otherwise unremarkable variant called Los Alamos Chess was designed as the first scacchic game that any computer ever played, all the way back in 1956. The limited power of computers is why the board was cut down to a 6x6 board. The game is identical to chess, except that en passant, castling, and bishops were completely removed from it.

A strong player beat the computer, but the computer -- MANIAC I -- managed to beat a novice in the only game from that time that was published. MANIAC I was more often used for improved thermonuclear calculations, which are apparently easier to figure out than chess. That's your comforting thought for the day!

Answer: 16

Janggi is Korean Chess, and very similar to Xiangqi. It uses the same set of pieces as Xiangqi, but there is no river, the General starts in the middle of the palace, and the elephant moves similar to a horse. A player is allowed to switch the order of their elephant and horse on both sides of the board, resulting in 4 possible starting positions. With the other player also having 4 arrangements, there are a total of 16 ways to set up the board. And while purely aesthetic, the pieces used in Janggi are normally octagonal in shape.

Answer: Gary Gygax

Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons & Dragons, created Dragonchess. He published the game in a 1985 issue of Dragon Magazine. As with most chess games, the goal is to deliver checkmate, but Dragonchess is played on three parallel 12x8 boards -- one each representing the sky, land, and underworld. Each player controls 15 different pieces (42 total).

Many of the pieces are allowed to move to different levels, but move differently while not on their starting layer. The dragon on the high level is particularly powerful, as it is able to capture pieces on the land level without leaving the sky level (which it is restricted to).

Answer: Star Trek

The version of Tri-Dimensional Chess shown on "Star Trek" is probably the most familiar three-dimensional version of chess for precisely that reason. It was first seen in the original series episode "Court Martial". Star Trek Chess was purely a background item, without any official rules. That hasn't stopped people like Andrew Bartness and James Dixon from creating a set of rules for it. James Dixon's version allows players to move around the small side boards. Commercially available boards of Star Trek Chess are quite rare, but similar games (like Strato Chess) are easily available.