Great Chess - Indian / Turkish variant

In an 18th century Indian manuscript, this game is described. The game is mentioned by several authors. Murray describes the game, mentioning its Indian source. Gollon bases his description of the game on Murray, but calls the game Turkish Great Chess. Schmittberger also describes the game briefly in his book.

Most authors agree: this is one of the nicest variants of great chess. I agree with them: the game is nice and interesting, with probably as largest disadvantage the slowness of pawns.

The real age of the game is somewhat hard to estimate, but given the modern type of moves of several pieces, its date of birth should probably placed after the middle ages.

The board

The game is played on a ten by ten board (uncheckered?). The opening setup is as follows:

Movement of pieces

Rook, knight, bishop, queen, and king move like in usual chess. (Actually, some of these pieces were called different in the original game, e.g., the queen was a general, the bishop an elephant.)

The giraffe is a powerful piece: it has the combined moves of queen and knight, i.e., of rook, knight and bishop.

The vizir has the combined moves of bishop and knight.

The war machine (dabbabah) has the combined moves of rook and knight.

Pawns move as usual pawns, but have no initial double step. When reaching the last row, pawns promote to queens.

Other rules

The player who mates his opponent wins the game. The rules about stalemate are unknown; play e.g. as in orthodox chess. Castling is not possible in this game.

Modern variant

Eric Greenwood also suggests to allow castling: the king is moved three squares towards the rook, and the rook jumps over the king to the next square.