petition: please make it possible to play Chaturanga or Shatranj on this website

Chaturanga is the earliest Form of chess. Most pieces move in the same way as usual, with the exception of Queen and Bishop (here wazir and elephant). It is interesting in the way that there the pieces are weaker, so that the king can come out earlier and play an active role, and pawns and pawn structures become even more important, since the pieces often don't have the power to corner the opponent's king on their own.

So this more "basic" kind of chess allows you to unfold the kings', pawns', rooks', and knights' full potential, since there is no omnipotent queen that can at any time come out of nowhere and check your king while simultaneously beating an unprotected piece.

So I think, Chaturanga is a nice way for beginners to learn how to use the less strong pieces well.

unfortunately , there is no website like chess.com for Chaturanga, so it's (at least according to my knowledge) impossible to play Chaturanga online against thousands of people. Therefore it would be very nice if chess.com made it possible to play Chaturanga here.

If other people are also interested, please comment to make the administration aware of it.

Thanks

I thought the 'Queen' in Chaturanga was a Ferz, (1 step diagonal), not a Wazir (which steps orthogonally). Note thatShatranj is a very boring game, with an excessively high draw rate. Chaturanga might be a bit better, because I believe the promotion rules are different there. (In Shatranj you can only promote to Ferz, which is barely stronger than a Pawn.)

 If you like that type of slow game, Makruk (Thai Chess) would be a better choice. It does away with the worthless Elephants (which can only visit 8 squares out of the 64), and replaces it by a more interesting piece.

Ok, good idea. But anyway, it would be nice if one of these slower games was playable on chess.com, because there is no other website which is as popular as chess.com. it would help make these versions of chess more popular and provide a big stage where everyone would have thousands of players to play against.

Donate 100K and Erik will probably make it happen

Great idea! how do I sign?

I support the idea that chaturanga or shantranj is played, it would be very interesting

I'm in

Same

You actually can play Chaturanga and Shatranj on chess.com. We are even playing Chu Shogi here.

I would like to play Chaturanga here.  evert823 states that we can play Chaturanga and Shatranj here at chess.com.

Shatranj please, it was a professional game with fixed rules, not Chaturanga.

Shatranj is just the original game, 1000 years older than modern chess. What we play today is the Mad Queens variant, surely an excellent variant, very tactical, but the original game is not inferior.

The weak elephants (Alfil) are the key for a good strategy, they can be very good or very bad depends on you, in practice their hard movement defines the strategic points on the board..

Thai Makruk is also a great variant, but not as deep as Shatranj in my opinion.

Makruk is a great game.Dear big brother chess.com.Make it possible for billions of people  to play it here.Thanks

I would like to play Shatranj here.

Yes we can, and we do already!   ...   It is called Chaturanga though:

Play / Variants / Historic / Chaturanga   ...    www.chess.com/variants/chaturanga