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 board for 3D chess would have 512 spaces, more than any large version of chess that had previously been invented; he then considered two-dimensional very large (or, in his word, "huge") chess games, mainly on the 16×16 board because such a board requires no non-standard equipment to construct, and while much larger than the 8×8 board, it was not so big as to make an unplayable game. This idea eventually came full circle in the development of the 16×16×16 three-dimensional version of Chess on a Really Big Board, which he called "impossibly large".

The standard rules of chess apply, except for the following cases:

The reason for Betza's inclusion of the rose in his initial setup was that it was a piece especially suited for a large board: it cannot display its full power on boards smaller than 13×13. Furthermore, its already large move still cannot reach all the way across the board, contributing to the large feeling of the game even further than the ability of the riders to attack from a large distance away.

Betza described his choice of pieces as "a very basic and logical selection of the fundamental geometrical moves, except for my idiosyncratic insistence on including the Rose in the lineup of pieces. These are largely the basic units of Chess, and anybody who designs a [16×16] game with 32 pieces is bound to come up with something reasonably similar, at least if they want it to be like Chess but a bit less tactical." In fact, his original plan was to include FD along with the complementary WA (the phoenix from chu shogi), but this leaves the c- and n-pawns undefended in the initial position. His final assessment was that the game was "rather chesslike".

Betza divided the pieces into three classes: seven long-range pieces (the rooks, bishops, queen, archbishop, and chancellor), two mid-range pieces (the rose and superknight), and six short-range pieces (the knights, FD's, and WFA's). He opined that the short-range pieces, though the weakest, were crucial as they take time to get into the action, but are very important for opening up specific lines for attacks.

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