Aliya Explains Chess Variants: General Variant - Four Player Chess

Four Player Chess boards may be hard to find because of their unusual shape. Still, it is worth the search, just to play simultaneous chess with more of your friends!

Four Player Chess courtesy of Amazon.com

BY ALIYA SALDANHA-SURI
Bronx High School of Science
COACH AND COLUMNIST

Four Player Chess General Variant is the ninth of fifteen variants in our special article series focusing on other chess playing games. Chess variants are one of the most enjoyable parts of chess. Whether you’re goofing off with your friends, playing by yourself on a computer, or even competing in a chess variant tournament. Chess variants offer many different ways to have fun playing chess and improve in different aspects of the game.

Four Player Chess

General Variant: In Four Player Chess, also known as Four-handed Chess or Double Chess, there are four colors of pieces and 160 squares on the board! It may be hard to find this chess variant over the board because of its unusually shaped chess board, but it is often played online because it’s just like regular chess, except you can have fun with more of your friends! There are many different variations to this game, so it is possible that the rules listed here will not be exactly the same as those in the four player chess game that you play.

How to win the game: The rules are slightly different from traditional chess, but the overall objective remains the same: to checkmate your opponents' kings.

Rules for Four Player Chess General Variant: All basic rules for four player chess are the same as regular chess. Red/orange moves first, and then it goes in clockwise order from there (i.e. blue goes second, yellow third, and green fourth or some color variation depending on the colors of the pieces). Checkmate and stalemate are only counted once the checkmated/stalemated player has had a chance to respond. For example, if blue checkmates red, it is only declared checkmate once it reaches red’s turn.

  • Queens start on the dark squares

  • En passant is not allowed

Four Player Chess courtesy of Wikipedia


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