Two Queens?

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Avatar of mikeecos

Hello,

I recently "invented" a variant with two queens each.  I have only seen a two kings variant so far and it was on a 10x8 board.  Has anyone heard of two queen games before?  I played one out yesterday and came to a draw with a friend.  We still allowed castling, but kind of like duck chess, there was no checkmate, just capture of the first queen and then the second as well.  I think the endgame would end in a lot of stalemates due to the abundance of moves or even several queens at that point, but please advise and I can share more about our experience and ideas!

Avatar of HGMuller

A game that is guaranteed to end in a draw is usually not very interesting. The amount of material you would need to capture even a single remaining Queen is much larger than any reasonable advantage you could have built up during the game. Wins in the middle-game are not really possible if you have to capture both Queens for it.

One solution applied in variants that use a slider as royal piece is to add the rule that they cannot move through check, similar to that a King cannot castle through check. (Or, if the game has no check and capture of the royal is the goal, make the royal slider e.p. capturable on every square it has passed through.)

The variant Pink Chess that I designed (where one of the players has two royal Queens and the other two royal Kings) uses this mechanic to make the Queens beatable. (Even a Queen that cannot pass through check is of course still stronger than a King, which cannot pass through anything, and this is compensated by making the capture of the first Queen already decide the game, while you would have to capture both Kings for that.)