My Four Player Chess Program

My Four Player Chess Program

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Hi all! Recently, I noticed that chess.com added an experimental four player chess game. While I myself find it quite enjoying, I still find it a bit lacking. A while back, I actually made a networked four player chess game in Java. There were four big differences I found between my program and chess.com's:

 

  • In my game, you promote your pawn on the last rank in the file. You may promote it to anything other than a king or a pawn. In chess.com, they left the pawn promotion rank at the 8th rank from your side and it auto promotes to a queen.
  • En Passant is where a pawn takes the spot where the captured pawn passes over, hence the French translation "in passing". En Passant in four player chess can be done to any color just by moving your pawn diagonally to the square another player's pawn passed over a move before.
  • If a player has no possible moves – either by checkmate or stalemate – that player loses their turn. they will continue to lose their turn if they have no possible moves. A player can only be eliminated if their king is taken. This means you can spare the player in checkmate by taking them out of checkmate.
  • The objective chess.com made was who got the most amount of points. My program follows the classic, last king standing objective.

 

Here is where you can download the program. You will need at least Java 8 for it to run! I haven't added timers or a resign button, but I plan to add these in the future. How do you like it compared to the chess.com version, and what other ideas would you like to see? I would like to know!

 

How to Connect to the Server:

  1. If you are going to have friends outside your network connect to your server and you have a firewall, you will need to port forward the 2222 port. (This is the default port)
  2. Load up the server and hit connect. Don't change the port number unless you know what you are doing. It will then show you your internal IP address.
  3. Load up the client and type in the internal IP address. Anyone who wants to connect to the server that is inside your network must use the internal IP.
  4. If your friends want to connect, they must use your external IP address which can be found here.
  5. Once all four players are connected and are ready, start playing!

Hi! My name is Jareth. I occasionally will post some of my projects related to chess here!

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