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This page is written by the game's inventor, Jury Adonin.

Kingchess

Yury Adonin from Russia send an email in January 1999 about the game of Kingchess. He wrote that it is widely played in Moscow. The variant has some similarities to Unachess, but is different in the fact that pieces can parachute in groups, but only on the players own half of the board. On January 5, 1999, the 2nd Moscow School Kingchess Tournament took place, with nearly 80 participants with ages from 6 to 13 years.

This game was invented by V. Sinelnikov. It appeared in: E. J. Gik, A. V. Suharev. Intellektual igri i razvlechenia. Moskwa, 1999. (Intellectual games and entertainments).

Rules

The rules are the same as in standard chess, but with the following changes:
  1. The board is initially empty and each player has the normal complement of 16 pieces in reserve.
  2. Players (first white then black) place an arbitrary number of pieces to their choice, but at least including their king, on their half of board (pawns may not be placed on the first row, and if a player places both bishops, then these must be placed on squares of different colors.)
  3. During a turn, a player must:
    • either do a common orthochess move (including en-passant, initial double-step, pawn moves and promotions)
    • or place an arbitrary number of pieces to their choice from their reserve on empty squares of their own half of the board (again, pawns may not be placed on the first row, and if a player places both bishops, then these must be placed on squares of different colors.)

Comment

One of the popular openings is to use the following setup to start:

k
bp
pp
p
PP
P
BP
K
White: Kb1,Bb2,pp: b3,c2,f4,g4
Black: Kb8,Bb7,pp: b6,c7,g5,f6


Written by Jury Adonin, (email removed contact us for address) l.ru, based partly on Jeff Miller's description of Unachess; several changes to the text made by Hans Bodlaender. Additional information sent by S. Sirotkin.
WWW page created: January 25, 1999. Last modified: February 28, 2001.