CHESH RULES

What's CHESH?

CHESH is a translation of CHESS as described in D. R. Hofstadter "Le Ton Beau de Marot" , chapter 7. The traditional game is translated from a 4 side board, to a 6 side one, modifying accordingly some elements.

The result is a board game very simitar to CHESS, (here follows a complete ruleset) but is played on an honeycomb pattern by three players, WHITE, BLACK and GREY. The rule are quite the same of classical CHESS, providing a correct translation of some elements, in particular the meaning of diagonal, horizontal and vertical.

Definitions:

DIAGONAL MOVE: Moving from a square, to the nearest square of the same colour (see the diagram of bishop's moving)

LINEAR MOVE: Moving from a square, to the nearest square of different colour, for CHESS it's horizontal or vertical (see the diagram the rock's moving)

Differences from CHESS and CHESH

Diagonal: this is probably the main difficult part of the translation: I followed the idea of Mr. Hofstadter, so we have 3 diagonals
Number of colour: follows from the definition of diagonal: 1 colour for each diagonal
Number of player: we have one player for each colour, and in a 169 hexagon board it seems to me that 51 pieces gives the correct initial ratio total-hexagon/occupied hexagon: in CHESS the ratio is 2:1, in CHESH it's about 3:1
Number of Bishop: 3, 1 Bishop for each diagonal
Initial position of Bishops: as we want 1 bishop for each colour, in the initial position the bishops must be allocated on hexagon of different colour, so it cannot be positioned near the King/Queen, as that 2 hexagons are always grey: I decided to exchange the position of the Bishop with the position of the Knight.
The Pawn: it moves to the opposite edge of the board, but in an hexagonal board, its straight on is a diagonal move: I prefer this option, we can call it semantic translation, to a simple sintactic translation of the Pawn moving from CHESS to CHESH

The Rules

CHESH is played on an hexagonal board by 3 players, White, Black and Grey, each one having 17 pieces: 8 Pawns, 2 Rocks, 3 Bishops, 2 Knights, 1 Queen and 1 King.
The initial pieces position is shown in the figure : i.e we have in the lower raw Rock - Bishop - Knight - Queen - King - Knight - Bishop - Rock, while in the second raw we have 4 Pawns - Bishop - 4 Pawns
The White player is the first to move, then we go on clockwise, the Grey and the Black.

Initial position

This is the description of pieces' movements: you can reference to the moving diagrams.

King: he can move (and capture) 1 hexagon in each direction, provided that the destination isn't commanded by an hostile piece

Queen: she can move (and capture) in every direction, over any distance over unoccupied squares.

Bishop: moves (and captures) diagonally, over any distance over unoccupied squares.

Knight: moves 1 hexagon linearly and one hexagon diagonally: only destination hexagon must be free: he captures in the same way.

Rock: it moves linearly, any number of unoccupied hexagon, and captures in the same way.

Pawn: it moves 1 hexagon diagonally in direction of his opposite edge: each Pawn for its first move can move 2 hexagons, at player's option. The Pawn captures linearly, on either of the 2 hexagon to his right or left. Each Pawn reaching the opposite edge, his promoted to another piece at player's option.

Moving diagram 1

Moving diagram 2

Castling: Each player can castle once in the game: the Kings moves 2 hexagons left or right toward the Rock, and this is places on the hexagon on the other side of the King: a player can castle if:

the King is not in check
the King don't pass over or alight on a hexagon commanded by an hostile man
Neither King nor Rook have never been moved previously
There're no pieces between King and Rook

Check: a King is in check when he is attacked by an opponent's piece: the King capture is not permissible, the player making check must say "check" when he is attacking opponent's King.
The player can:

move the King out of check
capture the hostile piece
place a piece between the King and the attacking piece

Checkmate: If none of the three things can be done, it's CHECKMATE: the player has lost the game, his King is removed from the board, while the other pieces remain frozen on the board: the game continues between the other two players: they can capture the 3rd player's pieces following the regular rules.

With the second checkmate, the game is over.

Here follows an empty hexagonal board, which can be printed to play: I use this board with the pieces from 2 small portable chess set.

An empty hexagonal board

For comments, suggestion or whatever you want, you can e-mail me at giangiammy@yahoo.com

Various bookkeeping:

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