Shatar

How Shatar is played

Shatar is the chess of the Mongols: the chess army with a bers in the queen’s place, and rules on how a game may be won. The goal is to checkmate the opposing noyon, the king, but not every mate wins.

The board and the start

The board and the start are those of chess, with the noyons facing each other on the e-file. The game always opens with the bers’ pawns two squares forward, 1.d4 d5; these two moves are already on the board when the game begins. Traditionally the board was all one colour and the armies stood on red and green bases.

The pieces

The noyon moves as the king, the camel as the bishop, the horse as the knight and the cart as the rook. The bers moves as a rook, any number of squares along a rank or a file, or one square diagonally. There is no castling.

Pawns

A pawn (a child) moves one square forward and captures one square diagonally forward. Apart from the opening there is no double step, so there is no en passant either. On the last rank a pawn becomes a bers.

Checks

Each check has a name: shak by the bers, a cart or a horse, tuk by a camel, tsod by a pawn. The names matter for the mate.

Mate

A mate wins only if a shak is among the checks that lead to it: the mating check itself, or one of the checks the mating player gave move after move just before it. Any other mate, by camels and pawns alone, is niol: a draw. A horse may not give the mating check: a mate by a horse alone is a draw too.

Robado

A player who takes the opponent’s last piece and leaves the noyon alone does not win: the game is drawn at once, robado, even when that capture mates. Leave the opponent a piece until you mate.

Stalemate and draws

A player who cannot move but is not in check is stalemated and has lost. The same position three times, or fifty moves each without a capture or a pawn move, is a draw.

Other readings

Shatar was played differently from place to place. The 1997 rules of Inner Mongolia let the bers move as a queen and the first player choose between the queen’s and the king’s pawns for the opening; older rules make a pawn on the last rank step back diagonally before it promotes. Some count stalemate as a draw. This app plays what most sources give.

The story

Mongolia · first recorded in the 16th century

When and where

Shatar is the chess of the Mongols. Its name, like the Kalmyk shatr, points to the Persian shatranj, and most historians think it came from Persia or Central Asia with the Mongol conquests of the 13th century; others see an older road with Buddhism. A chronicle of 1662 tells of a lord of the late 16th century who played chess with his mother.

How it changed

It kept the chess army but made it a picture of nomad life: the noyon (lord), his bers (a dog or a lion), the two-humped camel in the elephant’s place, “because there are no elephants in the north”, the horse, the cart and the children. The bers became a rook that may also step aslant, and the game gained rules of its own: a mate must come with a check by the bers, a cart or a horse, and stripping the enemy down to a bare king is only a draw.

Today

An article by Kondratev in 1931 is the source of the rules most books give, and the first Mongolian book on the game appeared in 1936. After Mongolia joined FIDE in 1955, international chess replaced shatar in official play. In Inner Mongolia it has been national intangible heritage since 2008, still with different rules from one county to the next. A larger game on ten squares by ten, hiashatar, with a bodyguard that slows the pieces around it, is known only from a Japanese booklet of 1999 and the writers who copied it; the Mongolian sets Rodolfo Pozzi showed in 2002 give the bodyguard other moves, so its rules are not settled.

Did you know?

In 1775 the British envoy George Bogle played Kalmuck pilgrims in Tibet, “masterly chess-players”. A Siberian at the board, he wrote, “gets surrounded by three or four of his countrymen, who lay their heads together and consult with him about the propriety of every move.”

Original piece names

noyon (lord, the king) · bers (a dog or a lion, the queen) · temee (camel, the bishop) · mori (horse, the knight) · tereg (cart, the rook) · khüü (child, the pawn)

Sources: H. J. R. Murray, A History of Chess (1913) · Lev Kisliuk, Mongolian Chess · Jean-Louis Cazaux, Shatar · Jean-Louis Cazaux, Hiashatar · Wikipedia

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