Three Player Chess Is As Hard As You Would Expect

If you're a fan of games of skill, then you'd be probably into playing a really hard game of chess. If you think that regular chess is way too easy for you, then you should try three player chess! Yes, it's just as crazy as you would expect.

Three player chess is like normal chess but - obviously - with a third player added. The board is shaped like a hexagon most of the times, but there are also other shapes. There are three different "armies" in three player chess, each one starting on their own side. Movements for the individual pieces are also the same. The difference is that the board squares are not actually square As a result, when you move, for instance, a rook, it ends up taking a curvier path.

3ManChess

Here are the rules:

You might be asking yourself, how could three player chess be fair? Couldn't you game up on just one player and take them down? Theoretically yes, and that's why three player chess was a challenging game to design reasonably. For the most common three player chess variants, the player who is the first to deliver checkmate is the winner. That means that the game is over when a player takes down another, with the third player coming in the second place. In other words, the first player to checkmate is first, the first player to be in checkmate is last, and, therefore, the other player comes second.

Dr. Jacek Filek/Wikimedia Commons

For myself, being somebody who loves chess but has never played three player chess, I decided to give the game a go. I stumbled upon a site called threechess.com where one can play against others or just two computers. I chose to play against a computer so that I could set the difficulty, as that seemed like a much more fun pursuit. So, I gave the game a go, and I must say that it was much more fun than common chess, at least in my opinion.

You're constantly worried about having your pieces taken down by two other players, and you also get to watch the carnage of the other players attacking each other too. It brings the fun of watching and playing a game of chess at the same time.

ThreeChess

Historically speaking, there have been other ways to play three player chess apart from the "first to checkmate" way. Famously, there used to be a "neutrality rule" that was introduced by Ilshat Tagiev in the mid-2000s. That rule stated that whoever's turn it is they can only attack the enemy in two cases: one, if they were attacked by that enemy in a previous move, or two, if the opponent wasn't attacked by the third player in its previous course. This rule prevents two players from chasing a third.