Clockwork Orange Chess

Clockwork Orange Chess is based on the 1971 movie A Clockwork Orange. In this movie, a young hooligan named Alex is released from jail after being conditioned to feel ill and nauseous at the thought of commiting violence. The idea behind Clockwork Orange Chess is that the same conditioning process is used on captured pieces. Captured pieces are replaced with non-capturing counterparts and given back to the player they were captured from, who holds them in hand until choosing to drop one on the board. When a non-capturing piece is captured, it gets replaced with a regular piece. This provides an incentive to not capture non-capturing pieces.

Equipment

Setup

Rules

• When a regular Chess piece is captured, it is replaced with a non-capturing counterpart of the same color and given back to the player of that color, who holds it in hand until he drops it on the board.

• When a non-capturing piece is captured, it is replaced with the regular same-color Chess piece which corresponds with it, given back to the player of that color, and held in hand until he drops it on the board.

• With the expection noted below, a player who has a piece in hand may use his turn to place it on any empty square on the board.
  • Pawns and non-capturing Pawns may not be placed on the last rank.

  • Regular Pawns promote only to regular Chess pieces, the same pieces as they do in Chess.

  Notation

  Use algebraic notation as you would for Chess. To denote a non-capturing piece, place its abbreviation in parentheses. For example, (R) denotes a non-capturing rook. For non-capturing Pawns, use (P). For drops, use an asterisk in place of the coordinate for the square it is moving from. For example, (P)*e4 means a non-capturing Pawn was dropped on e4, and P*d7 or *d7 means a regular Pawn was dropped on d7.

  Software

  I have written a ZRF file for playing Clockwork Orange Chess with Zillions of Games, an AI program for playing different board games, and you may download my Zillions Rules File for playing it from chessvariants.com.
  • cwochess.zip

  Zillions needs lots of thinking time to play a good game. It didn't beat me at the game until I gave it one minute of thinking time. However, I have since beat it even at one minute.