Glinski’s Half-Random Chess
The rules of Glinski’s Half-Random Chess are identical to the rules of Glinski’s Chess and the only difference is that initial position of all pieces except pawns, is set up randomly with only one restriction:
1.) three bishops on each side must be placed on hexagons of three different colors.
The pawns are placed exactly like in Glinski’s Chess.
The total number of possible starting positions in Glinski’s Half Random Chess is 214,665,422,400,000 (over 214 trillion!) and 46,332,000 of them are symmetrical.
This means that players can rely only on their intelligence, creativity and experience as they will always play very different games. At this moment there is of course, no software that could be used to set random initial position so I use the method with generator of random numbers that I will describe here. The random number generators are easily available today on Internet.
On each side the position of only four pieces is determined randomly but separately and differently for each player, meaning that the position of pieces are no longer symmetrical and mirrored to each other like in Glinski's Chess or Glinski's Random Chess. Those pieces are three Bishops and one Rook (picture GHRC 01). It is possible to get identical random positions for both players of course. For the positions bellow, I used exactly the same method like I used for Glinski's Random Chess.
picture GHRC 01
After both players placed their Bishops and one Rook at different random positions, the rest of the pieces are placed manually. White first places one of the remaining pieces (remaining Rook, two Knights, King and Queen) on the first rank, and then Black does the same. The players freely decide in which order they are going to place their remaining pieces. On picture GHRC 02, we can see that White placed his King to the safest position, at hexagon f1, and Black also tried to find safe place for his King. On picture GHRC 03, we can see that White placed his/her second Rook at its ‘natural’ position at c1 and Black replied with Queen at f10. I borrowed notation system from Crazyhouse chess variant for the manual placement of pieces.
1. K@f1 K@g10
picture GHRC 02
2. R@c1 Q@f10
picture GHRC 03
On pictures GHRC 04, GHRC 05 and GHRC 06 we can see the further development of the starting position setup.
3. Q@i1 R@c8
picture GHRC 04
4. N@e3 N@f8
picture GHRC 05
5. N@f4 N@g8
picture GHRC 06
After all the pieces are on hexagonal chessboard, the game proceeds in the usual way according to the rules of Glinski’s Chess.
Glinski’s Random Chess
The rules of Glinski’s Random Chess are identical to the rules of Glinski’s Chess and the only difference is that the initial position of all pieces except pawns, is set up randomly with two restrictions:
1.) three bishops on each side must be placed on hexagons of three different colors
2.) positions of pieces must be symmetrical and mirror images to each other.
The pawns are placed exactly as in Glinski's chess, but all other pieces are placed randomly. For this reason, the total number of possible starting positions is 46,332,000! This means that players can only rely on their intelligence, creativity and experience as they always play very different games. At the moment there is of course, no software with which the random starting position can be set. Therefore I use the random number generator method which I will describe here. The random number generators are easily available on the Internet today. Here I give an example of how to get random positions with the random number generator. At the beginning, the pawns are placed on both sides at their regular places, as in picture GRC 01.
picture GRC 01
The Bishops should be placed first so I decided to place Bishops that are placed at hexagons of their own color first: white bishops that need to be placed at light (white) hexagons and black bishops that need to be placed at black (dark) hexagons. There are six such possible hexagons on both sides so I used range from 1 to 6 and generated random number using a random number generator. I counted hexagons the same way we read in English, from left to right and from top to bottom. I got number 2 and placed first white bishop at c1 and mirrored that with the black bishop at c8. Look below at picture GRC 02.
picture GRC 02
Then I used the same method to place bishops at mid-tone hexagons, and after that, at hexagons of the opposite color of the player’s, white Bishops at dark (black) hexagons and black Bishops at light (white) hexagons. I’ve used range from 1 to 5 to place bishops at mid-tone hexagons because there are 5 such hexagons on both sides. I got number 5 and placed bishop at g1 and mirrored that position for the black bishop at g10 (picture GRC 03). For the third bishop I again used the same range and got number 2 again. Consequently, I placed last bishops at g3 and g8 (picture GRC 04).
picture GRC 03
picture GRC 04
Next I decided to place Rooks, but I could have chosen Knights or even the King and Queen instead, as players can freely choose the order in which they randomly place their figures once the bishops were placed first. However, it would be best to place pieces in this order: the Bishops, remaining Rook and Nights in whatever order, and then the Queen and the King. For the first Rook, there were 13 hexagons still available, so I used the range from 1 to 13 and got the number 1 and placed the first Rook at f4 and f8 (picture GRC 05). I repeated the same method with the second Rook, but this time I looked for random numbers between 1 and 12, because only 12 places were available (picture GRC 06). I continued with the same method and got the position for the first Knight (picture GRC 07).
picture GRC 05
picture GRC 06
picture GRC 07
Finally, I placed the rest of pieces repeating the above described method (pictures GRC 08, GRC 09 and GRC 10 ).
picture GRC 08
picture GRC 09
picture GRC 10
After getting initial position of all pieces (three Bishops, two Rooks, two Knights, Queen and King) this way, the game continues normally according to the rules of Glinski’s Chess.