Grable Plays 4-Player Chess (Variant #3)

Playing 4-player chess, on chess.com. This variant is “Tic Tac Toe,” one of my favourites. The game rules are 3-check, king of the hill (more details below).

Tic Tac Toe: Each player starts with 12 pawns which can promote to kings on their back rank, two knights, one rook, and one “Royal” king. For the purposes of king-of-the-hill, and standard chess moves, only the royal king functions the same way a king does in regular chess. All others are essentially pawns that can move in any direction, 1 space. Capturing a pawn counts as 1 point, kings and knights=3 points, rooks=5 points, and giving checkmate counts as 40 points. If all other players lose on time, or if a royal king makes it to one of the centre 4 squares, all remaining kings are checkmated. Stalemated kings are also awarded their own 40 points.

The time control in this version gave each player 1 minute to make all of his moves, plus 1 5-second delay on each move but other time controls are available and I would encourage anyone who thinks this looks like fun to log on and try it out!