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.

satellite=main files=2 ranks=12 graphicsDir=/graphics.dir/utrechtPNG/ promoZone=1 maxPromote=1 promoChoice= symmetry=mirror squareSize=31 graphicsType=png theme=OS rimColor=#FFFFFF whitePrefix=W blackPrefix=B borders=0 useMarkers=1 holdingsType=0 Pawn::fmWfcoF::a5,b5 Knight:N:oN::a4,b4 Bishop::oB::a3,b3 Rook::oR::a2,b2 Queen::oQ::a1 King::oK::b1

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.