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This page is written by the game's inventor, Вадря Покштя. This game is a favorite of its inventor.

Grand Dice Chess

As a longtime fan of all types of dice chess, I've always had the idea of finding a perfectly balanced chess game using dice. In the variants of dice chess that still exist, neither the board, nor the initial arrangement of the chess pieces, nor the number of dice used in  the game give the game the necessary harmony and dynamics, reducing tactics and strategy to a minimum. After much trial and error, I came to the only true variant of chess with a dice, in my opinion, which could satisfy the various needs of connoisseurs of this exciting game.

Setup

The game uses a 12x12 board.

White and black occupy the 1st-6th and 7th-12th ranks, respectively, as shown in the diagram.

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Grand+Dice+Chess&settings=grand_dice

 

Pieces

Each player has: 4 Kings 24 Pawns 8 Knights 8 Bishops 8 Rooks 4 Queens

Rules

The game uses four dice. Opponents make moves alternately, throwing 4 dice. The piece to move is determined by a die: 1 = pawn, 2 = knight, 3 = bishop, 4 = rook, 5 = queen and 6 = king. White starts the game first. The player makes four moves at the same time based on the indications of the dice and has the right to refuse any move that does not suit him, unless it is a pawn move. Exactly! Unlike in regular dice chess it's allowable to pass moves. And this rule was already applied about a thousand years ago in old variant of Shatranj (Shatranj al-Mustatîla or Oblong Chess), the Arabic pre-decessor of modern chess. However it's not allowed to pass on pawn-moves, except when they are blocked. Chess pieces move across the board as they do in ordinary chess - according to the standard rules of move and capture. The only minor exception is for a pawn that is not allowed to move forward two squares from its starting position. There is no castling, check and checkmate in the game. The goal of the game is to capture four enemy kings.

Notes

Moving in the direction that eventually led me to finding the perfect chess variants in which dice are used to alter gameplay, I constantly asked, strange as it may seem to you, the next question: 'What prevents a dice from revealing its full potential on a chessboard?' The answers did not immediately, but nevertheless began to be drawn more and more clearly as I went deeper into the root of the problem. The first and most important is the size of the board - 8x8 even for a single die, bringing various chess pieces to life, an extremely cramped platform to realize its nature. The second is the initial arrangement, since with the start of the game all the pieces should be more or less mobile. In ordinary dice chess, this is such an acute problem that it spoils the whole picture of the game, turning a chess battle into a farce. And the third obstacle is the rapprochement of the two armies. In a game with dice, this phase should be absent, since it takes a lot of time and patience, which does not correspond at all to the idea of dice - speed and racing.

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By Вадря Покштя.

Last revised by Вадря Покштя.


Web page created: 2022-02-01. Web page last updated: 2023-03-26

Revisions of MSgrand-dice-chess