Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.

This page is written by the game's inventor, Adam Norberg.

Zelda Chess

By Adam Norberg

Introduction

Zelda Chess was inspired by the Zelda fantasy video games by Nintendo where a character attacks an adjacent opponent with their sword. In Zelda Chess, all captures are made by adjacent pieces -- there is no capture by replacement. Also, three times a game a player may make a special attack that captures all pieces of either side adjacent to a selected piece.

Initial Board and Setup

Zelda Chess uses the standard orthodox chess board and starting array.

Rules

The game is conducted by rules of International Chess with the following changes:

The game is won by checkmating your opponent's King.

Examples of Capture

The following diagram shows some capture possibilities:

       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     8 |   |...|   |...|   |...|   |...|
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     7 |...|   |.k.|   |...|   |...|   |
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     6 |   |...|   |...|   |...|   |.N.|
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     5 |...|   |...|   |.R.|   |[*]|   |
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     4 |   |...|   |.P.|   |...| p |[*]|
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     3 |...|   |...|   |...| n |...|   |
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     2 |   |...|   |[*]|   |.P.| P |.P.|
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
     1 |...| K |.B.|   |[*]|   |[*]|   |
       +---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
         a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h
The lower-cased, underlined letters indicate black pieces, the uppercase letters indicate white pieces, the characters "[*]" indicate a square that the black Knight on f3 could move to. The black Knight has the following possible moves:

Zillions of Games

There is an implementation of Zelda Chess for Zillions of games. You can download it here:



Written by Adam Norberg. HTML Conversion by Peter Aronson.
WWW page created: August 22st, 2001.