Castle Siege Chess

This is a rules file for Zillions of Games, a Windows program that will let you play any puzzle or strategy board game you can feed it the rules to. With Zillions-of-Games installed, this rules file will let you play this game against your computer.

Castle Siege Chess merges traditional chess with Byzantine Chess (aka Circular Chess) on the CirSquare 96 game board. It replaces my original game, Round Table Chess. Byzantine Chess has two directions of attack--clockwise and counter-clockwise around the four circular bands, but had no way of playing across the hole in the middle. The CirSquare 96 board merges a 6x6 board into the whole, resulting in a board with three circular bands, one transition band, and a 4x4 square area in the middle of the board, thus adding a frontal attack direction.Each players chess pieces are placed in a 24 space castle.

The castles are separated by the battlefield, which consists of 4 rows of 12 spaces each. Thus all aspects of the board are exactly 50% greater than a traditional chess board. All of the traditional chess pieces move the same way as they do in traditional chess.

The game is played basically the same way as traditional chess, but with the option of playing with two new pieces--Archer and Catapult. They compliment the Rook, Bishop, and Knight. The Archer is essentially a short range Bishop that can jump and the Catapult is essentially as short range Rook that can jump.

Casstle Siege Chess on the CirSquare 96 game board has many interesting and powerful aspects:

• A wide variety of arrangements for the power pieces
• More interesting moves while still adhering to the basic rules of traditional chess
• The option of playing with two new chess pieces--Archer and Catapult
• 12 Pawns instead of 8; and, Pawns promote one row sooner than in traditional chess
• Option to play with four Knights and four Bishops
• Three directions of attack--from the front and two sides
• Four triangular spaces on the transition band provide for unique moves

There are two Zillions files: as 590x590 pixel board and an 800x800 pixel board for large monitors. There are 18 variations with the main difference being the setup of the power pieces. The Zillions chess engine is very strong. I suggest clicking Play > Computer opponent and then setting Strength to between Pushover and Better, Variety to Small, and Average Time to about 2 or 3 sseconds. That will give a much better chance of beating the computer. Of course, you choose to play another player insteasd of the computer. I especially like the way Zillions will show you the legal moves for a piece by left clicking it.

If Zillions crashes after a dozen or so moves, restart it and turn the music off: click View > Options and uncheck Music in the Audio panel. If you would like more information on Castle Siege Chess, please visit the CastleStrife.com website.

Download Instructions

Instructions on downloading this Zillions file:

• Download the .zip file
• Extract the contents of the .zip file to your Zillions of Games folder
• Be sure you have the "Use folder names" checkbox checked when you extract the files.