Shafran’s hexagonal chess

How Shafran’s hexagonal chess is played

Shafran’s hexagonal chess, invented by Isaak Shafran in 1939, plays on a board of 70 hexagons with a corner towards each player. The goal is to checkmate the opposing king; no move may leave your own king attacked.

The board

The board is a hexagon of 70 cells in three colours with a corner towards each player. Nine files, a to i, run straight up: the e-file in the middle has 10 cells, the a- and i-files 6. A rank is a straight line slanting down to the right: rank 1 runs from a1 down to e1, White’s corner.

The start

White has the king on e1, the queen on d1, rooks on a1 and i5, knights on b1 and g3, bishops on c1, f2 and h4, and nine pawns from a2 to e2 and on to i6. Black stands the same way, turned half round: the king on e10, the queen on f10. The queens do not face each other, and every bishop can move at once. 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 go up to the middle of its file: the d-, e- and f-pawns one to three cells, the b-, c-, g- and h-pawns one or two, the a- and i-pawns one. A pawn that went two or three cells can be taken en passant on any cell it passed, by a pawn that attacks that cell, on the next move only. On the last cell of its file a pawn becomes a queen, rook, bishop or knight.

Castling

Each side may castle with either rook, short or long, if the king and that rook have not moved and the cells between them are empty. In the short castling the rook comes up next to the king and the king steps over it: with the rook on a1 the king goes to c1 and the rook to d1, with the rook on i5 the king goes to g3 and the rook to f2. In the long castling the king goes next to the rook and the rook jumps over it: the king to b1 and the rook to c1, or the king to h4 and the rook to g3. The king may not castle out of check, across an attacked cell or into check. To castle, move the king to its cell. The castlings are written Q-0-0 and Q-0-0-0 on the queen’s wing, B-0-0 and B-0-0-0 on the bishops’ wing. Some sources give only half of them: Pritchard’s encyclopedia the long ones, the Jocly program the short ones; Gik’s article of 1985 and the Russian Wikipedia give all four.

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.

Where it comes from

Isaak Shafran, a Soviet geologist, invented the game in 1939; Pritchard dates it 1953. He applied for a patent on its board in 1956 and showed the game at the Leipzig exhibition in 1960. Evgeny Gik wrote in 1985 that the regular hexagon of Gliński’s board may have helped Gliński’s game become the more popular one.

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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