Patent Application
20050179203
This invention relates to multiplayer chess games. The invention is particularly related to all chess games that use hexagonal spaces in the game board, to all chess games with boards having other than four sides, and to all chess games that rely on physical characteristics of the chess pieces to facilitate play. The invention is also related to multiplayer chess games that introduce new methods of play in order to duplicate, in a multiplayer environment, the challenge of standard chess. Finally, the invention is related to all chess games that introduce new methods of piece movement.
The purpose of our invention is to resolve the Petty Diplomacy problem in multiplayer chess.
Chess games with hexagonal boards or with truncated triangular boards are known in the prior art. Chess games using flat, stackable pieces are also known in the prior art. Chess games with a board with spaces that are taken out of play during the course of the game are also known in the prior art. Further, there are several multiplayer chess games known in the prior art that attempt to solve the petty diplomacy problem. However, there are no prior art chess games that combine alone all three of the above elements. Our invention is an improvement over prior art attempts to solve the petty diplomacy problem because, by relying on physical characteristics of the game apparatus, we are able to implement a method of play that better adheres to the spirit of two player chess.
Prior art ideas for chess game construction can be found on the Chessvariants website's crafts section (http://www.chessvariants.com/crafts.dir/index.html), and include the use of a combination of tiles and tokens to create chess boards and chess pieces for chess variants. The construction concepts and materials (posterboard tiles and pokerchip pieces) used for the physical implementation of our invention were first published by Fergus Duniho on Chessvariants.com (http://www.chessvariants.com/crafts.dir/construction-set.html). Further suggestions by Tony Quintanilla for use of tiles, along with an approximation of a 91 hex tile board using square tiles are also on the Chessvariants.com website (http://www.chessvariants.com/crafts.dir/ceramic_tiles/construction-set.html), as are examples by David Howe for the use of tokens as pieces (http://www.chessvariants.com/crafts.dir/chessdiscs.html). None of these craft ideas are integral to a method of play, and are not specifically intended to resolve the petty diplomacy problem in multiplayer chess. Stackability of tokens is not referenced as an advantage in any of the descriptions of these construction kit ideas. Detachability of tiles is mentioned only in the context of flexibility in creating different board shapes, not as a feature to be taken advantage of during the course of play.
This patent is not intended to restrict the right to use or expand upon the chess game construction ideas published in the crafts section of the Chessvariants.com website.
Standard chess boards are eight by eight squares, typically a single board with each space drawn on the board or permanently attached to the others. Our chess board is roughly hexagonal in shape, and is made of detachable tiles. This allows tiles to be removed from the board during the course of play. Our Rules set out the conditions upon which tiles may or must be removed from play.
To create the board, the tiles are placed together in a hexagon pattern, with sides alternating between six and seven tiles in width. Hexagonal spaces in a hexagonal board have been used to create variant chess games before, most notably with the McCooey and Glinski (British Patent 616,572) chess variants, which are six tiles to a side. Both are two-player games, not multiplayer games as our invention is.
Several chess sets use a hexagonal board or hexagonal spaces to create the board. Examples of strictly hexagonal boards are U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,920,247 (Jenkins), 3,964,747 (Balmforth) and 5,582,410 (Hunt) showing hexagonal boards with seven spaces per side, 6,070,871 (Wilson) with eight spaces per side, and 4,580,787 (Baker) with nine spaces per side. Examples of boards with six sides where the sides alternate in length (truncated triangles) are 3,744,797 (Hopkins) with alternating sides of five and ten spaces, 3,778,065 (Hale) with alternating sides of six and eight spaces, 5,158,302 (Rewega) with alternating sides of four and eight spaces, and 6,170,826 (Jones) with alternating sides of eight and nine spaces.
Our invention has a six-sided board with alternating sides of six and seven spaces.
In all of these examples emphasis is on the shape of the board and the arrangement of the spaces on the board. In no case is the construction of the board mentioned or relevant to the chess set. In addition to a unique board shape, our invention also has a unique board construction. The novel feature of our invention in this regard is that the spaces are made of detached tiles that are placed next to each other during setup for play, but are not permanently attached to each other. Constructing the board with detachable tiles facilitate rules that allow for the removal of tiles during play. This makes the board smaller over the course of play, which mitigates the Petty Diplomacy problem by reducing the ability of players to “stay out of the fight”. Our detachable tiles could equally well be any other shape or combination of shapes on a board of any size or shape.
Atlantis Chess (http://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/atlantis.html), Cheshire Chess (http://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/cheshir.html), and Shrink Chess (http://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/shrink.html) have rules that remove spaces from play.
In the games Vortex and Tile Chess, there is no distinction between a space and a piece. In these games, there is no board. Instead, tiles (not tokens) are the pieces, and in most cases, can move around the playing surface. In our invention, tiles act only as spaces, and do not move (though they may be removed from play). Tokens act as pieces. The game Twilight Imperium uses hexagon tiles as spaces and figurines, not tokens, as pieces.
Chinese and Japanese chess variants use tokens that are flat to represent the chess pieces, as does our invention. However, the rules do not allow for pieces to be stacked. Our Rules take advantage of the fact that tokens can be stacked, and use that capability to reduce the impact of the petty diplomacy problem.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,806,125 (Bialek) discloses a chess game with stackable pieces. Unlike the instant invention, Bialek's game board does not use detachable tiles, has square rather than hexagonal board spaces, necessarily uses only one side of a stackable piece for play, and is not designed for multiple players.
The games Reversi and Othello use tokens to represent pieces, and the rules allow tokens to be flipped over in order to indicate which player controls that token. In our invention, tokens are flipped over in order to represent the type of piece that it is (its movement ability). Flip Chess and Flip Shogi (hup://www.chessvariants.com/38.dir/flip.html), and Reality Check (http://www.chessvariants.com/39.dir/realitycheck.html) also use both sides of tokens, to indicate promoted or variant pieces. None of these games take advantage of the stackability of tokens.
In Checkers, tokens represent pieces, and the stackability of tokens is used to represent promotion of a checker to a King. In our invention, tokens are stacked in order to represent captured and capturing pieces. In our invention, unlike checkers, tokens can be unstacked as well.
The game of Laska (http://research.interface.co.uk/lasca/index.htm), invented by chess champion Emmanuel Lasker, uses stackable pieces for a variant of Checkers where captured pieces remain on the board and can subsequently be liberated by the original owner. Unlike the instant invention, Laska does not use detachable tiles for the board, has square rather than hexagonal board spaces, and is not designed for multiple players. Unlike Bialek's game, and similarly to the instant invention, it does use both sides of the stackable pieces.
Pillar Chess (http://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/pillar.html) is an adaptation to chess of Laska Checkers. Pillar Chess uses tokens for pieces, so that they can be stacked, and the rules for Pillar Chess allow captured pieces to be released. Pillar Chess differs from our invention in that it is not a multi-player game, uses squares for spaces instead of hexagons, the double-sidedness of the tokens is not relevant to game play, and the number of spaces in the board is fixed for the duration of the game.
The best description of the petty diplomacy problem is by Peter Aronson in a comment found on the Chessvariants website in the description of Fergus Duniho's Three Player Hex Shogi 91 (http://www.chessvariants.com/hexagonal.dir/hexshogi/3player91.html). The relevant excerpt follows:
“Looking at your interesting articles on Hex Shogi, I was reminded of some thoughts I once had on three-player Chess variants and the petit diplomacy problem. While I'm sure you're aware of it, I'll repeat it here for the sake of discussion. There are two parts:
(1) In a three-player game, one player can sit out the fighting while the other two fight. Then, once the fighting is over, defeat the damaged victor.
(2) In a three-player game, two players can gang up on the third, eliminate them, and then fight each other to the death.
A review of HEXCHess (based on the Jenkins U.S. Pat. No. 3,920,247) also mentions the diplomacy problem in three-player chess:
“Chess was a game, designed to play with two players. There have been several designs of chess for three players, but all have a common problem: exchanging is in the advantage of the player that is not involved in the exchange. Thus, combinations, where a player wins a strong piece against a weak piece of himself, are often not advantageous.”
All of the prior art attempts at resolving the petty diplomacy problem in multiplayer chess either fail to address both aspects of the problem, or do so with rules that incorporate, rather than eliminate, petty diplomacy in the method of play.
The most direct acknowledgment of the petty diplomacy problem, and the best attempt at resolving it, is by Glenn Overby in his description of Orwell Chess, found on the Chessvariants website at http://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/contest84/orwellchess.html. The description of his solution follows:
“The petty diplomacy problem was attacked with a combination of rules. Dice limit the ability to move pieces freely to gang up on someone. The Shifting Alliances rule requires would-be allies to beat up on each other much of the time. And the Perpetual Power rule keeps the victim of misfortune around for revenge.”
The Shifting Alliances requires a player to attack each of his opponents in turn. The rule is successful in hindering both a player staying out of the fight and an alliance of two players against a third, but comes at the cost of directing players to consider attacks on the basis of ‘who is next’ rather than ‘where is the threat’. A second problem with the rule is that it was designed for a three player game, and would become progressively less practicable as the number of players increased. In contrast, our invention's method of play allows players to attack the pieces of any play at any time they see fit.
Derick R. Peterson addresses the Petty Diplomacy problem in the 3-player variant of his game Grand Hexachess (http://www.chessvariants.com/hexagonal.dir/grandhexachess.html). His rules-based solution allows players to move multiple pieces in one turn, and requires that any player not involved in a capture also remove a piece from the board. Our invention requires only that a player not involved in a capture move their King to a new hex.
Siege chess (http://www.chessvariants.com/multiplayer.dir/siege.html) has rules allowing a player to invoke a three-turn truce in order to thwart an alliance. During the truce, the targeted player has special movement, capture, and other abilities.
The purpose of our invention is to resolve the Petty Diplomacy problem in multiplayer chess, without destroying the fundamental characteristics of two-player chess.
The chief obstacle to a transfer of two-player chess strategy to a multiplayer chess game is the “Petty Diplomacy” problem. The Petty Diplomacy problem in multiplayer chess has two manifestations:
Our invention resolves the petty diplomacy problem through a new chess board shape, the novel combination of stackable tokens for pieces and detachable tiles to form the board, and a method of play that takes advantage of the physical features of our game apparatus.
Our chess board shape is a six-sided polygon with alternating sides of six or seven spaces. There are 108 total hexagonal spaces in the board.
The use of flat, stackable tokens for the chess pieces facilitates a method of play allowing captured pieces to remain in play and be returned to control of the original owner under certain conditions. Keeping captured pieces in the game facilitates a method of play that allows a player to potentially recover from being the target of an informal alliance, once that alliance shifts its attention and/or composition to target a new leading player. This also reduces the advantage accruing to a player whose strategy is to let the other players fight and lose pieces.
The use of detachable tiles to create the board facilitates a method of play that allows tiles to be removed from the board (and so removed from play), making the board progressively smaller over the course of the game. This makes it progressively more difficult for any one player to stay out of the fight.
The unique board shape, and choice and positions of pieces at start of play duplicates, for a three player game, the playing environment of standard chess. Our invention achieves the intent to preserve the look and feel of standard chess. Despite being hexagon-based, all pieces move analogous to standard chess. The variant piece movements are also closely related to their standard chess counterparts. The ratio of pieces to board spaces in the three player version is 50% (54 pieces and 108 spaces), just as in standard chess (32 pieces and 64 spaces). By using three bishops, our invention has one bishop per space-color, just as in standard chess. Further, the variant piece that a Bishop promotes to, the Cardinal, is also colorbound, which is another unique feature of our invention. Each army has one pawn for each major piece, as in standard chess. The start position of each army is analogous to that of standard chess, in that pawns are in front, Rooks are in the corners, and Knights are the only pieces that can move from their start position without a pawn first having been moved.
The physical characteristics of our chess components facilitate resolution of the petty diplomacy problem in several ways. The detachable tiles enable rules that allow tiles to be removed from the board during play, making the board smaller during the course of the game, thus reducing the ability of any one player to stay out of the fight. Stackable tokens allow captured pieces to remain in play, and enable rules that allow for captured pieces to return to their original owner, reducing the disadvantage that accrues to players that exchange pieces in a multiplayer game.
Our method of play also addresses the Petty Diplomacy problem. Having the center of the board be a destination for promotion of pieces, and a game-winning destination for the King, encourages players to move pieces to the center of the board, as in standard chess. Allowing players to continue playing even after losing control of their King assures that no player is forced out of the game before the others, which means that the people who at the start of the game wanted to play together can do so throughout the game.
Our invention is not strictly a three player game; it can be played by as many as care to play, including as few as two players. The invention is “backwards compatible” with standard two-player chess. Different board shapes can be created, thanks to the detachable hexagonal tiles. The use of tokens facilitates design, use, and inclusion of other variant pieces for play. The size of the hex tiles and the size and shape of the tokens can be varied if convenient, depending on what is available at the local crafts store.
Drawings showing how pieces move on a hex board, including the variant pieces, can be found in the method of play section of this document.
The tiles (
During play, according to the method of play, tiles are taken away from the board (
During setup, tokens (
This application claims the benefit of provisional patent application No. 60/545,630 filed Feb. 18, 2004
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60545630 | Feb 2004 | US |
