Chaotic Chess or

Polymorphous Chess

By Laurent Dubois

Here another chess variant discovered when I conceived the idea of playing dominoes with dice.

When I conceived the game Cubominos, the 3D-Dominoes, I realized that, dice also allow one to play numerous classical games. Indeed, with different numbers of black and white dice, and a checker board as large as one needs, one can play Reversi (Othello), Draughts, Go, and, above all, Chess.

The 6 possible values of a die could represent Chess pieces as follows:

1 = Pawn
2 = Knight
3 = Bishop
4 = Rook
5 = Queen
6 = King

The next insight was the discovery that it is possible to play an incredibly complex variant of Chess that could give work to programmers for a long time when the classical version of Chess has lost interest.

Consider this: initially, pieces are put on the board in their normal position, the number on the upward face of the die determines the value of the piece.

The orientation of the lateral faces of the die could be unrestricted, OR pre-determined and the same for each player.

The new rule when moving is this: you have to rock the dice (tip it 90 degrees in any direction) whenever they move! This means that the upward face value of the die changes once the move is completed. For example, a Knight (value = 2) could become anything but a Queen.

Can you imagine the complexity of such a chess-variant? It seems to me very interesting because the new rule is extremely simple, but allows countless developments, and is less arbitrary than, for example, Fisher Random Chess.