Our chess games are fun to play and easy to learn. You can challenge the computer in a game of traditional chess, or try your turn at one of our variations. Choose your ideal set of pieces, pick a color, and start your strategy! A true master spends hours honing their craft.

John Gollon, well known by chess variant enthousiasts for hisbook on chess variants, now unfortunately out of print, was workingon a second book on chess variants. Also unfortunately, this second bookwas never published. Gollon has sent some materials from a draft of thebook to Eric Greenwood (in 1976): the description given here is based onpart of these writings by Gollon.

• SparkChess is an excellent way to get better at chess - learn the proper rules (including the elusive en-passant), practice openings, test strategies, use the board editor to recreate famous positions with FEN strings, replay famous games, import/export PGN games and databases (with comments and annotations) and let the computer help you.
• 'Pigeon chess' or 'like playing chess with a pigeon' is a figure of speech originating from a comment made in March 2005 on Amazon by Scott D. Weitzenhoffer1 regarding Eugenie Scott's book Evolution Vs. Creationism: An introduction.

This game was invented by Henry Bird in 1874. Bird actually proposedseveral variants of the same idea: below you find the one that appearedin Gollon's manuscript. The Encyclopediaof Chess Variants mentions several other proposals. Bird publishedhis ideas in the City of London Chess Magazine. This game is a predecessorof Capablanca's Chess; Capablanca probablywas inspired by Bird's variant.

Play Chess With A Pigeon

Rules

The game is played on a 10 by 8 board. Players have, in addition tothe usual pieces, two additional pawns and an guard and equerry. The setupis as follows:

White:
King f1; Queen e1; Guard d1; Equerry g1; Rook a1, j1; Knight b1, i1; Bishopc1, h1; Pawn a2, b2, c2, d2, e2, f2, g2, h2, i2, j2.

Black:
King f8; Queen e8; Guard d8; Equerry g8; Rook a8, j8; Knight b8, i8; Bishopc8, h8; Pawn a7, b7, c7, d7, e7, f7, g7, h7, i7, j7.

Game Pigeon Chess

Another possible setup has the pieces of black in reverse to the pieces of white: inthat setup, blacksqueen is on the same row as the king, etc.

Movement of pieces

The guard has the combined moves of rook and knight. The equerry hasthe combined moves of bishop and knight. Pawns can promote to queen, guard,equerry, bishop, rook, or knight.

When castling, the king moves three squares in the direction of therook, the rook jumps over the king to the adjacent square, so e.g., kingto c1, rook to d1, etc.

Other rules are as in orthodox chess.

Equipment

You can use some kind of Chess variant construction set that will let you make boards of different shapes and sizes. You might use a Rook and a Bishop from a larger Chess set to represent the Guard and Equerry, or you could buy specially made pieces.

Written by Hans Bodlaender, based upon material written by John Gollon,sent to Eric Greenwood in 1976, and sent to me by Eric in 1997, and someinformation from The Encyclopediaof Chess Variants. WWW page created: September 1, 1997. Last modified: February 6, 2005.