Octopus Chess

This page contains one or more presets for playing a game online with Game Courier, an online server for playing Chess variants by correspondence.

The new pieces are:
The Octopus: - A powerful crooked slider that controls multiple files, ranks and diagonals.
The Sorcerer Snake: A piece that follows one of two crooked paths to squares that are a Knight's move away or an extended Knight's move away.
The Ninja Pawn:- A stronger pawn can also move sideways anywhere and capture sideways on the enemy half of the board.
The Ninja Pawn is not present in the intial setup but is dropped during play into a vacant space on the second rank. It can be optionally pushed forward on the same turn.
The Knights are replaced by the Ferz-Knight and the Wazir-Knight which make additional diagonal or orthogonal stepping movements.

Otherwise, the rules are exactly as in orthodox chess except for: Flexible castling (King can castle by moving 1, 2 or 3 (or 4 on Q-side) spaces towards rook, the ability of pawns to move 1-multiple spaces towards the middle and asociated extended en-passant rules.

The board is set up as follows for the white side (black side will mirror this): Rook on a1 Wazir Knight on b1 Bishop on c1 Sorcerer Snake on d1 Queen on e1 King on f1 Octopus on g1 Bishop on h1 Ferz Knight on i1 Rook on j1 10 pawns from a2 to j2. Note that the lower right square is white, and that kings occupy the same color square. 5 Ninja pawns to be dropped one per turn into empty space from a2-j2