Check out Symmetric Chess, our featured variant for March, 2024.

This page is written by the game's inventor, Mark Thompson.

In January 2000, J. Mark Thompson wrote:

Hello everyone,

Cuarenta is my submission to the contest to design a chess variant on a board of 40 squares. A .zip file is attached which contains cuarenta.zrf and the bitmaps needed to play this game on Zillions; you will need to create a directory \images\cuarenta for the bitmaps. The rules follow:

Cuarenta, by J. Mark Thompson

Cuarenta is played on the light-colored squares on a 9x9 board (in which the corner squares are dark). The dark squares do not exist for this game: for example, squares e4 and e6 are adjacent (orthogonally). The pieces are the King (K), Bishop (B), Vao (V), Guard (G), Camel (C), Frog (F), and Pawn (P). The initial setup is as follows: