McCooey’s hexagonal chess

How McCooey’s hexagonal chess is played

McCooey’s hexagonal chess, by Dave McCooey and Richard Honeycutt (1979), plays on Gliński’s board of 91 hexagons and stays as close to chess as it can. The goal is to checkmate the opposing king; no move may leave your own king attacked.

The board

The board is Gliński’s: a large hexagon of 91 cells in three colours with a corner towards each player. The files run straight up, a to l without j; the ranks are numbered up each file and bend at the f-file.

The start

White has the king on g1, the queen on e1, rooks on d1 and h1, knights on e2 and g2, bishops on f1, f2 and f3, and seven pawns from c1 through f4 to i1. Black stands the same way at the top, the pawns on rank 8. White moves first.

The pieces

The pieces move as in Gliński’s game. A rook moves straight across cell edges in six directions, a bishop through cell corners in six directions and stays on its colour, the queen as both. The king steps one cell in any of the twelve directions, and the knight jumps to the twelve nearest cells that lie on none of its lines.

Pawns

A pawn steps one cell straight forward and captures one bishop step forward, diagonally to either side. On its first move it may step two, except the f-pawn. A pawn that stepped two can be taken en passant, diagonally, on the cell it passed, on the next move only. On the last cell of its file it becomes a queen, rook, bishop or knight. There is no castling.

Winning

Checkmate wins. Stalemate is a draw.

Draws

Stalemate, the same position three times, fifty moves each without a capture or a pawn move, and kings alone are draws. A king with a single bishop or knight can still mate in a corner, so that is no draw by itself.

Where it comes from

Dave McCooey and Richard Honeycutt made their version of Władysław Gliński’s hexagonal chess in 1979. Their aim was a game on hexagons as close to chess as possible: fewer pawns, which capture diagonally, and stalemate a draw.

The story

Poland and Britain · Władysław Gliński’s game of 1936

When and where

Władysław Gliński, a Pole, invented hexagonal chess in 1936. After the Second World War he settled in Britain, and there he launched the game in 1949. He completed its rules in 1972, changing what a stalemate counts, and published Rules of Hexagonal Chess in 1973 and First Theories of Hexagonal Chess in 1974.

How it changed

Boards of hexagons had been tried before, in Croughton’s game of 1853 and Jaques’s Hexagonia, but neither was won by checkmate. Gliński kept the chess pieces and their ideas on 91 cells in three colours: the rook and the bishop got six directions, the king and the knight twelve moves, a third bishop covers the third colour, and the pawns stand in a chevron. In 1979 Dave McCooey and Richard Honeycutt made a version closer to chess, with seven pawns that capture diagonally. Isaak Shafran, a Soviet geologist, had made another game on hexagons in 1939, on 70 cells and with castling; he applied for a patent on its board in 1956 and showed it at Leipzig in 1960.

Today

Pritchard’s encyclopedia reports that the game once had over half a million players, mostly in Poland, where 130,000 sets were sold in a few months, but also in Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Russia. The first British championship was played in 1976; in 1980 an international federation was founded in London, and Marek Maćkowiak of Poland won the first European championship. After Gliński’s death in 1990 the game declined, and its federation started again in Hungary in 1996. Evgeny Gik thought in 1985 that the regular hexagon of Gliński’s board may have helped it win more players than Shafran’s.

Did you know?

On hexagons a king and two knights can mate a lone king, which they cannot force in chess. And since a stalemate counts, even two bare kings are no sure draw: a careless step into a corner can let the other king take every cell from it.

Sources: Wikipedia · D. B. Pritchard, The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants (2007) · The Chess Variant Pages · Kvant · Google Patents

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