Saturday Morning Gaming: Three Person Chess

Chess is probably something we could write about at length… the various openings like The Spanish Game, The Italian Game, Two Knights Defense (my favorite), and so on. It’s a great game for uncles to teach to nephews and for nephews to eventually defeat uncles at. I haven’t played in about a decade, though… until…

We visited some dear friends for the Holidays last night and the boys got a set of Chess For Three for Christmas. (It was that exact set, but I can’t find a version for sale here in the US! Which is weird!)

I sat down to play a game and, golly, it’s something else. Here, check out the board:

The middle of the board, the circular part, is a void. You cannot end a piece’s movement in the void. See those swords? You can’t move your pieces past the handles of the swords *UNLESS* they border a player that has been checkmated. If they border a player that has not, then they cannot be moved past. The blades of the swords prevent pawns from moving past them… but the non-pawns cannot move past them.

What I found most interesting is the diagonals. See those loops? Those are the diagonals and they can, potentially, take you all the way around the board and back to your starting position.

The Bishop is probably the second-least interesting piece on the board, after the pawn, but on this particular board? Holy cow. They become about as interesting as the Rook. There are so very many more moves to consider before moving this or that piece.

Additionally, I found that having to watch two players make moves before your next one *COMPLETELY* wrecked any ability to path potential moves out.

When Chess is one-on-one, you can come up with a fairly decent ebb and flow of how the moves are going to go and you can see which moves you hope for and which ones you’re dreading and have a gameplan for either one.

With two people playing? Absolute chaos. Your best laid plans will go aft agley within seconds. There’s also an issue of how it’s easier to play against the player on your left but much more difficult to play against the player on your right… and also how a game where you switch where your two opponents are sitting will result in a COMPLETELY different game.

I tried to open with something like Two Knights but there’s no real center to the board to control anymore. And when you get out there and start running around, you have to deal with two different threats and defend against two different directions.

Everything was so very different that it made this game that had grown familiar into something completely alien.

I still don’t know if I like it.

But if you have a couple of chessheads in your circle, maybe get them a copy of the game to play. Just be prepared to play both of them and receive a proper whuppin’.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is the board. Photo lifted from Amazon’s page selling the UK version.)