Chess with different armies This army includes a lot of leapers, but most of them have asymmetrical move patterns, with backward moves being restricted. The rooks, knights, bishops, and queen are replaced by the following pieces: The four armies described above were playtested by Ralph Betza and selected as the most balanced ones. There are other armies, invented by Betza and other people, some of which are presented here. In the initial version of the game there were 8 armies and in these armies the king moved differently from the king in the standard chess. Instead of normal pawns, fairy pawns could be selected,
Courier chess that there was no consistency as to which squares were dark. The more frequent practice seems to be that the square at each player's lower-right is white. The winning objective is the same as modern chess: to checkmate the enemy king. The pieces are as follows: At the start of the game each player must move his rook pawns, his queen pawn, and his queen two squares forward (see top diagram). Such a two-square leap along a file was called a "Freudensprung" (English: "joy-leap"). Wirnt von Gravenberg, writing early in the thirteenth century, mentioned the Courier Game in his poem