Games Like Chess

The Japanese relative of chess, on a 9 by 9 board. One rule changes everything: a piece you capture joins your army and can be dropped back on almost any empty square. Material never leaves the board, so trades do not simplify a position and an attack rarely runs out of pieces.

Chinese chess. Pieces sit on the intersections, a river splits the board, and the two generals are confined to a palace and may never face each other on an open file. Games are faster and more forcing than chess, because the cannon needs a screen to capture and creates threats out of nothing.

One piece type, forced captures, and a body of theory as serious as the chess opening books. The international 10 by 10 version is the deeper one. It takes a minute to learn and years to play well.

You place stones and surround territory. There is no checkmate and no material, so the whole game is about shape and influence. It has more legal positions than chess by an enormous margin, and computers needed two more decades to beat the best humans at it than they did at chess.

Played on a chess set, designed so that a computer would find it hard. You push and pull your opponent's pieces and try to walk a rabbit to the far side. The branching factor is huge, which makes calculation less useful and planning more so.

A 5 by 5 board and five movement cards shared between the players. When you use a card, you hand it to your opponent, so the set of legal moves keeps rotating. It is chess-like calculation with almost no rules to learn.

Tiles form the board as you play them. The goal is to surround the opposing queen, and the one-hive rule means a piece that would split the group cannot move at all. Every piece is a pin waiting to happen.

Actual chess, with the slow parts removed. Every game starts in the middlegame, so no opening theory applies, and it ends on checkmate or a two-point material lead instead of running to a bare-king endgame.