88 Hexagons Chess

Introduction

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 - the intellectual property of the author) 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. On the diagram bellow, the possible moves for pawns are marked with green rings and the promotion cells with orange ones.

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 colors.

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.

The 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)

Example game

1.) Bg2 d7 2.) c5 b6 3.) b3 Bc9 4.) Qc2 Nge9 5.) Nge4 c6

position after 5 moves

6.) cxd7 Nb8

(black queen can’t take at d7 because of the counter attack with bishop after pawn at f4 moves forward which would result with the loss of black rook at b9 after black queen escapes)

7.) e6 f5 8.) Nef1 g6 9.) Bh2 Qh6 10.) Bf7 Bg10 11.) g5 Ba5+

12.) Bd2 Qh4+ 13.) Kd1 Bxf7 14.) gxf7 Ri5 15.) Qe3  Bxd2

position after 15 moves

16.) Qxd2 Ba3 17.) Nf2 Bi3 18.) h3 Nd8 19.) a4 b5 20.) Qg3 Qxg3

21.) Nxg3 0-0-0 22.) Rd3 Bg7 23.) Rd2 Nf6  24.) Nxf6 Bxf6 25.) d5 cxd5

position after 25 moves

26.) Rxd5 a6 27.) d8 Rid9 28.) i4 i5 29.) Ng4 Bxg4 30.) Bxg4 Re12

31.) e7 Nc6 32.) f8 h7 33.) b4 Na3 34.) Rc5 Kg8 35.) Kd2 Kf7

position after 35 moves

36.) Kc3 h6 37.) ixh6 Kxh6 38.) f9 Kg8 39.) Bi3 Kf10 40.) Rg2 Rh6

41.)Rc9 Ri6 42.)Bh5 Rgh 43.) d9 Rd11 44.) Re11+ Rxe11

45.) dxe11 Ke11 46.) Rd1 Rh7 47.) Bi3 Rxh3 48.) Bg7 i4 49.) Be8 i3

50.) Rd9 i2 51.) Rg10+ Kd10 52.) e12=Q+

1 – 0 Black resigned

final position

All comments are welcome!

I ask you to publish a printed book about the variant. In English and even in Russian.

The book can be an introductory one, and include discussions about opening strategies, tactics, endgame technique etc.

There is a desperate shortage of printed books on chess variants.

Erez, thanks for your comment. It is difficult to publish a printed book, but electronic one in pdf format shouldn't be a problem (in both English and Russian).

Hello Daslov. I urge you to try to publish a printed book for it has no substitute.

However, if you don't want to or can't for some reason, then an electronic book is better than nothing.

But  if you have a book in PDF format you can try to submit it to chess book publishers and try to publish it in print format. 

You can also try to make it available in a print-on-demand format.( Some Russian online bookstores

offer that). That means that no fixed amount of copies is printed, but if you order a book and

pay for it then a printed book is prepared for you.

Dark_Knight_50, that's the equivalent of capturing orthogonally to the side. On hexagonal boards, the "diagonals" would be those lines that maintain the same color as the beginning square which the piece moves from. Daslov had it 'right'.

Though, personally, I did find a bit more favor in your re-arrangement of the board's starting position; since it's more symmetrical than Daslov's OP diagram.

=)

That was not his game but Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, one of many hexagonal chess variants.

All of these, and perhaps very soon '88 hexagons' you may play here:

https://greenchess.net/

Ok, there is no absolute symmetry in '88 hexagons' but so what? There is a castling unlike in Glinski's and McCooey's chess.

Good news. The world most famous and the best site devoted to chess variants, decided to publish this game. Big honor, having in mind that such a great variant of chess like Shafran's chess haven't been published there yet.

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/88-hexagons-chess-

UPVOTE! me wantee

Why is there no hexagonal chess on chess com?

Probably because that require a lot of coding for something that might not get much play.

They would have to rebuild their chess system from the ground up.

Nowadays, this is no longer a problem and the sources of engines are generally available.

Yeah, but I think some other features need to come first, like a custom piece builder.

But hexagons would be cool.

Pawn promotion is very unlikely. The pawn movement is bad. The setup is bad. I do like the fact that you are looking for an improved version of the game. But this is not going to be it.

I would LOVE to see this as a variant to play.

Nice

What if the bishops stand in line like e1, e2, e3, the king stand on f1 and the queen stand on d1 (or viceversa)? It bothers me that the way the pieces stand is not symmetrical.

In this version https://hexchess.one/practice it's like that but unlike on hexchess there is no worry about a first check move by the queen.