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Check out Chess with Different Armies, our featured variant for July, 2024.
Check out Chess with Different Armies, our featured variant for July, 2024.
I'm thinking of rewriting the text for this page. Here's a draft:
Chess variants are a family of strategy board games that are related to, inspired by, or similar enough to the game we today call Chess. The game we today know as Chess was based on earlier games, most immediately the Arabian game of Shatranj, which is believed to be based on the Indian game of Chaturanga. Besides Chess, the most played variants are Shogi (in Japan), Xiangqi (in China), and Janggi (in Korea). Besides the most popular variants, there are countless others, some obscure and little played, some newly invented. Some were never meant to be played, created only for Fairy Chess problems. Some were invented by professional Chess players who had mastered Chess so well they were seeking new challenges. Some were invented by entrepreneurs who have produced commercial sets. And most were invented by creative people who like to try out new pieces, new rules, or new ideas.
This site seeks to catalog the vast number of Chess variants created throughout history, as well as to nurture the creation of new variants. Thanks to computers, it is now easier to play new Chess variants than ever before. We have benefited from Zillions-of-Games, which has allowed us to program and play numerous Chess variants against the computer. And we offer Game Courier, which enables you to play numerous Chess variants against others online, including new games of your own invention.