Four-player chess Four-player chess Four-player chess (also known as Four-handed, Four-man, or Four-way chess) is a family of chess variants typically played with four people. A special board made of standard 8×8 squares with an additional 3 rows of 8 cells extending from each side is common. Four sets of differently colored pieces are needed to play these variants. Four-player chess follows the same basic rules as regular chess. There are many different rule variations; most variants, however, share the same board and similar piece setup. Gameplay can be in teams, but it can also be a free-for-all, with each player out
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