Can Chess, with Hexagons? [video]

Not specifically "hexagonal chess, but a very tactically similar hexagonal abstract strategy game called "Hive"[1] is very well regarded in the board game community and relevant to this discussion for anybody even tangentially interested.

Personally, I think it's more worth spending your time looking into that than yet another variant of chess. Also if you get a hankering to play it, it is available on boardgamearena online.

[1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive

The moves described in the video seemed like they were decent analogues to me. The bishop moved along the same color and could attack rooks and knights from safety and could slide between pieces. Rooks could attack bishops and knights safely. Knights could attack rooks and bishops and queens safely.

What specifically did you think was way out of context?

If you watch the video, you'll find that on a hexagon, things make no less sense than on a grid and the folks who worked out hexagonal chess actually did a pretty great job preserving all those roles. Your brain just isn't use to hexagon logic.

I think it would be cool if the base of the chess piece was a triangle instead of a circle and orientation mattered. So you could introduce a new move into the game which is picking up a piece and twisting it 60 degrees to put you on a different axis of the hexagon. This opens up three new directions (sides 2, 4, and 6) and closes the previous three (sides 1, 2, and 3).

Edit: Fix math.

I find it kind of hilarious that whites first move can be 1. Qb4, past their beginning pawn wall, and staring right that blacks queen through blacks pawn wall, and where it is immediately taken by black’s first move: 1... Qxb4

Did you even watch the video?

Rooks having 3 directions in hexagonal chess is "as naturally built on the geometry of a hexagon", as rooks having 2 directions in square chess. I have no idea what you're objecting to.

You entirely miss the playfullness that is inherent in chess variants. You switch up the rules and see what happens.

Polgars star chess has solved this by using adjacent fields as diagonal fields. The orientation of the board is as such, that there are 3 axes, North-South (Vertical), Northwest-Southeast and Southwest-Northeast (the diagonals). Using this approach, bishop and pawn move alongside the same diagonals, one loses however the "color" aspect of the bishop (i.e. the bishop can reach every field). Polgar's rook can then only move vertically, not to the side. The queen moves in all 6 directions of the hexagon. This leads to an interesting game dynamics where the bishop actually feels more like a rook, and the rook resembles the Lance in shogi.

There is a hexagonal shogi variant with 3 players

The problem is that 2 players kind of would team up to get the third player out of the game which is imbalanced. Than you have a 2 player game ..

I do not know with what pieces Chess 3 will be played, but Chess 4 will be played with sticks and stones.

A youtube comment points out that this allows pawn walls which protect each other and block on file moves, just like in real chess.

No. It's literally what if chess, but hexagons.

Yes, he mentioned in a comment[0] that he got his hex diagonals confused.

> My brain was clearly too melted by that point -- I got my hex diagonals confused. CURSE YOU DIAGONALS!

  [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgR3yESAEVE&lc=Ugz_oSLguMoeaVkugGN4AaABAg.9s-LI3bFJ389s-M7pcbfF2

Whenever you think to yourself that Chess, but X, would be interesting, you should just pop it into a search engine: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40511/hyperbolic-chess

I say this not as a "you should have searched", but because it's fun. There are thousands of chess variants in the world ( https://www.chessvariants.com/Gindex.html ) and it's amazing where this simple game can be taken.

I've also seen several different variants for chess on a torus (imagined -- still played on a flat board, but you play as if each edge is connected to the opposite one). Pieces end up having basically the same allowed moves (IIRC the only required change is that a piece making a move where it loops around the board and back to its original position is disallowed), but a different initial setup is required, because given the regular one, both sides start the game already check-mated. For further brain-bending, you can do a Klein bottle instead of a torus.

Or aperiodic tiles. There you can have every game with different "map".

Red Queen problem?

I want to share https://www.pychess.org/ as well - while it doesn't have hexagonal chess, it has tons of variants and you can play both against the computer (that runs fairy stockfish - an engine that works with many chess variants) and against human players

My current favorite is https://www.pychess.org/variants/empire - it's been designed to be wildly asymmetric but actually the balance between the two armies are more even than regular chess' white vs black pieces.

My problem is that there is no literature, no published theory on most chess variants. At least I can't find any theory on empire ehess, and thus I have to develop strategies on my own - but that's how I played chess 20 years ago and it was awful.

The best part of chess IMO is the social aspect of having an evolving theory (or as other games call it, an evolving metagame), and the way we can learn theory to be able to quickly assess who is winning at a given position (a highly nontrivial task), or assess whether a move is "natural" or not.