88 Hexagons Chess
This game was created unintentionally. The author wanted to create a chessboard on which it would be possible to play all major variants of hexagonal chess in his opinion: Glinski's Chess, Shafran's Chess and McCooey's chess. This is how HCB88 (hexagonal board with 88 hexagons) was created. And indeed, it was possible to play all mentioned variants on that board. The only problem was that Shafran's Chess for example, became a very different game and the same thing has happened with Glinski's and McCooey's chess. So, the author had an interesting chessboard but not an original game for it. At that point he started looking for a rules of a new game based on his personal experience with other variants of hexagonal chess.
Setup
Setup is similar to that of Glinski's Chess but as a big fan of Shafran's Chess, author wanted to allow castling. Therefore, he put queen and bishops together in one cluster and king to the bottom. Elongated board gives better distance between the pieces and interesting dynamics of the game.
Pieces
Pawn
Pawns move forward and capture diagonally like in Shafran's and McCooey's Chess. However, from their initial position, they can move up to 3 hexagons forward if there are no obstacles. It means that they can be promoted after five moves just like in classical, standard chess but at the same time, the possible initial number of moves with pawns is much higher than in other hexagonal chess variants which also results in higher complexity of the game.
Bishop
Bishops move and capture diagonally, just like in Glinski's, Shafran's and McCooey's chess. There are three of them on cells of three different collors.
Knight
Knights move and capture just like in Glinski's, Shafran's and McCooey's chess.
Rook
Rooks move and capture orthogonally just like in Glinski's, Shafran's and McCooey's chess.
Queen
Queen moves and captures both orthogonally and diagonally just like in Glinski's, Shafran's and McCooey's chess.
King
King moves and captures one cell orthogonally and diagonally just like in Glinski's, Shafran's and McCooey's chess.
Rules
En Passant
There is the en passant capture rule like in standard chess and in Glinski's, Shafran's and McCooey's chess.
Castling
Similar to Shafran's hexagonal chess, there is a castling rule in 88 Hexagons Chess, which doesn't necessarily help the players but in certain circumstance can be still very useful. Castling in this variant should be much more rare than in standard chess but should happen more often than in Shafran's chess in which it is very easy to destroy opponents chances to use castling for defense. Castling can be played on both sides as long and short which results in higher complexity of the game.
Positions of rooks and king before castling
Left short castling, Notation: 0-0 (Kc1)
Right short castling, Notation: 0-0 (Kg1)
Left long castling, Notation: 0-0 (Kb1)
Right long castling, Notation: 0-0 (Kh1)
This 'user submitted' page is a collaboration between the posting user and the Chess Variant Pages. Registered contributors to the Chess Variant Pages have the ability to post their own works, subject to review and editing by the Chess Variant Pages Editorial Staff.
By Davor Vujacic.
Last revised by Davor Vujacic.
Web page created: 2020-09-11. Web page last updated: 2020-09-11