Four player chess variant established by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
✦ NEW ✦EST. 1888800×600 OPTIMIZED
WELCOME TRAVELER TO THE TEMPLE OF ENOCHIAN CHESS ~~~ PART OF A SERIES ON CYBERENOCHIAN RITUALWARE ~~~ FOUR ARMIES CONTEND UPON ONE BOARD ~~~ MAY YOUR HIEROPHANT GUARD YOUR THRONE ~~~
Choose your army ★
Two teams contest the board: Blue & Black against Red & Yellow. You command one army; the computer plays the other three.
Choose an array
The historical setups differ only in which piece stands where. All are legal, pick by name.
Who moves first
Turns always pass clockwise from whoever starts: Yellow → Blue → Red → Black.
Choose
The working concludes
How this version plays
The board and armies. Four armies — Yellow, Blue, Red, Black — share one 8×8 board, each starting along one edge. Blue and Black are allied against Red and Yellow. Turns pass clockwise.
Pieces. King and Knight move as in standard chess. Rook slides orthogonally; Bishop slides diagonally. The Queen does not slide; she leaps exactly two squares in any direction, hopping over whatever's in between. Pawns move one step toward the board's center (never two) and capture diagonally; they may only promote once their army has lost at least one pawn, and normally only into their own designated piece.
The throne. Each army's corner square starts with two pieces stacked on it (the King and one other). If an enemy captures that square before either piece has moved away, both are taken at once.
Check. There's no checkmate. If your king is attacked, you must move the king if it has anywhere to go, even somewhere still under attack, unless your own pieces block every square around it, in which case you may move something else instead.
Capturing a king. Walking any piece onto an enemy king captures it and freezes that whole army in place. Frozen pieces can't move, can't be captured, and don't threaten anything, but they still block the squares they sit on. A team loses once both of its kings are gone.
The concourse. Five marked squares near the board's center are special: if a Bishop (or a Queen) moves onto one of them while the other three squares already hold the other three armies' Bishops (or Queens), all three are captured at once, even an ally's. Bishops and Queens also can't normally capture one another any other way.
Privileged pawns. If an army is reduced to just King + Queen + one pawn, King + Bishop + one pawn, or King + one pawn alone, that last pawn becomes "privileged" and may promote to any piece type on reaching the far edge. If that type is already on the board, the existing piece is demoted back to a pawn.
This build keeps the rules above but leaves out a few rarer Golden Dawn refinements. Seizing a frozen ally's throne, exchanging captured kings, and bare-king draws, to keep a first version shippable. They're reasonable additions later.