Courier chess

Courier Chess (or The Courier Game or simply courier) is a strategy board game in the chess family. The original form probably originated in the 12th century and is known to have been played for at least six hundred years. The game was subsequently replaced by a more modern form. It pioneered the modern chess bishop (called the "courier"), and probably played a part in evolving modern chess out of Medieval Chess.

Courier Chess is played on a board of eight ranks by twelve files. Literary and artistic evidence indicate that the board was checkered from the beginning, but 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 Wigalois, and expected his readers to know what he was talking about. Heinrich von Beringen, about a hundred years later, mentioned the introduction of the couriers as an improvement in chess. Kunrat von Ammenhausen, still in the first half of the fourteenth century, told how he had once in Constance seen a game with sixteen more men than in the "right chess": each side having a trull, two couriers, a counsellor, and four extra pawns. He added that he had never seen the game anywhere else, in Provence, France, or Kurwalhen.

Sometime shortly after 1475 someone put the courier on the standard chessboard in place of the old alfil and gave the queen the combined powers of the courier and the rook. This game was so much more exciting than medieval chess that it soon drove the older game off the market. Other improvements were tried out. One was an optional double first step for the pawns. This was at first restricted to the king's, queen's, and rooks' pawns, and then gradually extended to the others.

...
Wikipedia