Snake Chess

By Sergey Sirotkin

Introduction

Snake Chess is a variant of orthodox chess played on a cylindrical board of twelve ranks by two files, with 10 pieces on a side.

Board and Setup

The Snake Chess board is a cylinder, with the A file effectively sandwiched on both sides by the B file, and visa versa.

Click below to display piece moves

White:
Pawn: a5,b5; Knight: a4,b4; Bishop: a3,b3; Rook: a2,b2; Queen: a1; King: b1

Black:
Pawn: a8,b8; Knight: a9,b9; Bishop: a10,b10; Rook: a11,b11; Queen: a12; King: b12

Interactive diagram: pieces movable, right-click resets!

Click here to open/close a piece overview. Play it!

Info for selected board piece

	mc	Move or capture
	mc	Move or capture (unblockable jump)
	m	Move only
	im	Move only (unmoved piece only)
	c	Capture only
	m,c	Forbidden move, but delivers check
Click on piece to toggle its moved status

Because the board is actually a cylinder, Knights attack the space immeadiately in front of and behind them as their wide jumps wrap around.

Additionally, Queens and Bishops make zig-zag up and down the board as their diagonal movements also wrap around.

This gives them effectively the movement pattern of a Crooked Bishop.

Rules

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

The setup is different (see the diagram above), with each side having a King, a Queen, and two Knights, Bishops, Rooks and Pawns each.

There is no castling, Pawn double-move or en-passant capture.

Pawns promote on the twelfth rank.

The game is won by checkmating or stalemating your opponent.

Notes

A game with some similarity to Snake Chess is Narrow Chess, which is played on a 20 by 2 board.

Zillions of Games

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

snake-chess.zip

Written by Sergey Sirotkin. HTML Conversion by Peter Aronson.

WWW page created: June 16th, 2001.

Comments

Snake Chess. A variant played on a 2 by 12 cyclindrical board. (2x12, Cells: 24)

Daniil Frolov wrote on Fri, Jun 23, 2017 11:36 AM EDT:

Practically, on 2-square-wide board, like in this game or Narrow Chess, crooked=cylindrical bishop works just like vertical mover (rook with no sideways movement) would, the only difference is that they are bound to different kind of "dimensions". So, it seems logical to have 2-square-wide game with 2 crooked bishops, 2 vertical movers, 1 rook and 1 c. bishop with sideways wazir move added. And a mixture of pawns and berolina pawns (they would also look identical, but in different dimmensions according the same logic).

Hmmm, how the same principle would look in more wide games?..