Mysterious chess

By Sergey Sirotkin

Introduction

Mysterious Chess is a game of placement. Each player has a deck of sixteen cards, with one card for each Chess piece in the Orthochess array. Players take turns placing cards facedown on squares of the board. When all cards have been placed, the cards are flipped over and play begins.

Rules

The game is conducted by rules of Orthochess, with the following changes:

• The setup is determined by the placement of the cards (see below).
• There is no castling, Pawn double-move or en-passant capture.
• (Editor's Suggestion: white's pieces are not considered to attack the black King on the first move.)

Placing the Cards

Each player has a hand of sixteen piece cards: 8 Pawn cards, 2 Knight cards, 2 Bishop cards, 2 Rook cards, 1 Queen card and 1 King card. The backs of the cards should not be distinguishable from each other.

Placement goes as follows:

• White places the first card.
• Players alternately place a single card from their hand on to the board, until all cards have been placed.
• A card may be placed on any empty square on the board, except that a card may not be placed on the same horizontal, vertical or diagonal line as the card just placed by the other player.

Equipment

You can make up special cards for this game, or, if you have a Chess board with large squares, you could use a miniature pack of playing cards. In that case, use the red suits for white, and the black suits for black, and use the following mappings between cards and pieces:

Piece	Cards
King	King
Queen	Queen
Rook	10
Bishop	Ace
Knight	Jack
Pawn	2,3,4,5

Comments

The arrangement can turn out with the white and black pieces strongly mixed. Certainly if the players are restrained and place the cards defensively, the game will not start as all attacking. But if the cards (and pieces) are be mixed, the game can be unexpected and amusing.

Variation: Mysterious Casual Chess

Shuffle both sides cards and combine them into one pack. Players then place the cards one at a time from the combined pack without looking at the card's fronts.

Since the back of the cards are identical, the players do not know what type or color of piece they have placed on any square. It results in the greater randomness in the arrangement of the pieces.