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Phase Chess

Phase Chess -- Semi-Official Rules

  • Preface

    These rules are modelled after the F.I.D.E. Laws of Chess. These distinctly do not try to cover all possible situations that may arise during a game. I have no intention of confining you to my concept of the game.

    Feel free to play with whatever rules and variations you like, whenever you like. If you come up with a good variant, or have a good match to show, I'd like to here it.

  • Article 1: The Chessboard

    The game of phase chess is played between N players on M square boards called chessboards. If W is the number of players on the white team, then B = N - W is the number of players on the black team.

    The number of boards must be greater than or equal to half of the number of players M >= N/2. Additionally, a game of phase chess is a connected, bipartite graph with players as vertices and boards as edges. In the case where W = B = 1 and M = 1, the game becomes standard chess.

    Each chessboard is a standard chessboard as described in the F.I.D.E. Laws of Chess Section 1.1-1.5.

  • Article 2: The Pieces

    The pieces and their starting positions are identical to those found in the F.I.D.E. Laws of Chess Section 2.1-2.3.

  • Article 3: The Right To Move

    The player(s) with the white pieces commence the game. Once all white players have moved, all players with the black pieces move. This alternation continues until the game is completed.

  • Article 4: The General Definition Of The Move

    To be a legal chess move, a move must be legal (in the sense of F.I.D.E. Laws of Chess Section 4.1-4.3 on all boards that the player is playing in, and must be carried out atomically in all said boards. The only exception to this is a capturing pawn. A capturing pawn need only have a legal capture in one of the said boards. [Note: most of the variations of the game qualify this rule.]

  • Article 5: The Moves Of The Pieces

The pawn exception is to aid the game play. Without it, the pawn structures jam up the entire graph. One of the variations of the game is to ditch this exception.