Tic Tac Chec

Tic Tac Chec is a small chess variant game, sold commercially. Daniel U. Thibault saw this sold in a shop in January 1997. Below, you see his description of the game.

Components

A 4x4 chessboard; two sets of four chess pieces (pawn, rook, knight and bishop).

Object

To form an alignment (row, column or diagonal) of all four of your pieces.

Setup

Start with an empty board.

Rules

Players alternate taking turns. On his turn, a player may either:

1. Place on any empty square one of his unplaced pieces, or
2. Move one of his already placed pieces. Moving a piece is only allowed after the player has placed at least three pieces on the board.

Pieces move as per normal chess, except that pawns reverse the direction of their progress once they've reached the edge of the board and can no longer advance (so pawns keep going across and back).

Pieces attack as per normal chess. A piece "taken" is not sequestered but returned to its owner for later placement (so enemy pieces can only be temporarily removed from the board).