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,
Chess on a Really Big Board Chess on a Really Big Board Chess on a Really Big Board is a large chess variant invented by Ralph Betza around 1996. It is played on a 16×16 chessboard with 16 pieces (on the back rank) and 16 pawns (on the second rank) per player. Since such a board can be constructed by pushing together four standard 8×8 boards, Betza also gave this variant the alternative names of Four Board Chess or Chess on Four Boards. Chess on a Really Big Board was created as an outgrowth of Betza's ideas on three-dimensional chess, after he noted that an 8×8×8