Carrera’s chess

How Carrera’s chess is played

Carrera’s chess, printed in 1617, is chess on ten files with the champion and the centaur, played by the Sicilian rules of its day.

The board and the start

Ten files, a to j, and eight ranks. On rank 1, from a to j: rook, centaur, knight, bishop, queen, king, bishop, knight, champion, rook; ten pawns on rank 2. Black stands opposite on the same files. White moves first.

The two new pieces

The centaur moves as a bishop or as a knight, the champion as a rook or as a knight: each turn one of the two moves, and the knight’s move leaps as in chess. The other pieces move as in chess.

The Sicilian rules

Carrera plays everything else as the chess of his day in Sicily. The king never leaps, so there is no castling. A pawn may step two squares on its first move, also past an enemy pawn, which cannot take it en passant. A pawn on the last rank becomes a queen, even when its side still has one.

Winning and draws

Checkmate wins; stalemate is a draw, as Carrera says. The same position three times, fifty moves each without a capture or a pawn move, and positions where neither side can mate are draws too, by today’s rules.

The story

Sicily · Pietro Carrera’s game of 1617

When and where

Pietro Carrera (1571–1647), the priest of Militello in Sicily, who also wrote on the history of the island, printed the game in 1617 in the eighth book of Il gioco de gli scacchi, his bulky treatise on chess, dedicated to the Prince of Pietraperzia.

How it changed

He widened the board to ten files and put two new pieces beside the knights: the champion, which moves as a rook or a knight (it could be called a “rook-knight”, he says), and the centaur, a bishop and a knight in one. Everything else follows his ordinary game, which he plays by the Sicilian rules: the king never leaps, so there is no castling, a pawn may step two squares past an enemy pawn without being taken, and it becomes a queen. He ranked the champion just below the queen and the centaur just below the champion.

Today

Carrera did not mean it to replace chess, which he called perfect; it was for “lovers of new things”. It never got beyond his book: in 1804 Pruen wrote that it seemed to have died with its inventor. The same two pieces came back in Bird’s proposal of 1874 and in Capablanca’s chess, and Hans Aberg’s variation of 2003 uses Carrera’s very row of pieces.

Did you know?

Carrera even described how the new pieces should look: the champion’s top was to show a rook and a knight, the centaur’s a bishop and a knight. He advised bringing the champion out only after some exchanges, like the queen.

Sources: P. Carrera, Il gioco de gli scacchi (1617) · H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (1913) · The Chess Variant Pages

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