Hexagonal chess

The term hexagonal chess designates a group of chess variants played on boards composed of hexagons. The best known is Gliński's variant, played on a symmetric 91-cell hexagonal board.

Since each hexagonal cell not on a board edge has six neighbor cells, there is increased mobility for pieces compared to a standard orthogonal chessboard. (For example a rook has six natural directions for movement instead of four.) Three colours are typically used so that no two neighboring cells are the same colour, and a colour-restricted game piece such as the orthodox chess bishop usually comes in sets of three per player in order to maintain the game's balance. Many different shapes and sizes of hexagon-based boards are used by variants. The nature of the game is also affected by the 30-degree orientation of the boardcells; the board can be horizontally (Wellisch', de Vasa's, Brusky's) or vertically (Gliński's, Shafran's, McCooey's) orientated. (For example, when the sides of hex cells face the players, pawns typically have one straightforward move direction. If a variant's gameboard has cell vertices facing the players, pawns typically have two oblique-forward move directions.) The six-sidedness of the symmetric hexagon gameboard has also resulted in a number of three-player variants.

The first applications of chess on hexagonal boards probably occurred mid-19th century, but two early examples did not include checkmate as the winning objective. More chess-like games for hex-based boards started appearing regularly at the beginning of the 20th century. Hex-celled gameboards have grown in use for strategy games generally; for example they are popularly used in modern wargaming.

Gliński's hexagonal chess, invented by Władysław Gliński in 1936 and first launched in Britain in 1949, is probably the most widely played of the hexagonal chess variants. The game was popular in Eastern Europe, especially in Gliński's native Poland. At one point there were more than half a million players, and more than 130,000 board sets were sold.

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