Check out Balbo's Chess, our featured variant for October, 2024.

This page is written by the game's inventor, Andy Lewicki.

In June 2003, Andy Lewicki emailed us:

Hello to everybody at my favorite site on internet.

It is becoming obvious, that utilizing the attacking power of each figure may lead to a fascinating group of related games. One of them can be just solitaire games. Only our imagination can set the limit on the number of games based on the simple idea of CHEVERSI.

CHEVERSI SOLITAIRE

Version I

A player puts randomly on a board all the pieces (16 of them). In the next step the player counts all the attacked squares by all the pieces. He/she remembers this number. Now, by replacing only 8 white (or black) pieces, by putting them into different unoccupied squares, player tries to at least double his initial score. He/she counts all the attacked squares in this new situation and if the number is at least doubled, he/she won the game, if not, game is lost.

Version II

This time a player puts every piece on an empty board one at a time. After all 16 pieces are on a board, he/she counts all the attacked squares and tries to score the highest possible number. This version is similar to open version of CHEVERSI. How high can we go with this count?

Version III

Black pieces occupy on of the diagonals and white occupy another diagonal initially. Array is as follows: white: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook starting from a8 down along the diagonal to h1. For black: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, rook starting from a1 up, along diagonal to h8.

The number of attacked squares is fixed. From this position, moving all the pieces only once, using normal chess moves, the goal is to retain the count of attacked squares in the new situation as close as possible to the original count (equal counts are, of course, the most desirable). After equal count is achieved the player can try to make another challenge by establishing another goal, like equal + 1, + 2 and so on.