Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Chess is one of the most popular and respected board games of all time. Millions of people play chess worldwide. Chess is played by people of all ages and nationalities. Playing chess is not only fun, but it is also an excellent intellectual activity because the board game forces the player to think logically and figure out every possible scenario from the beginning of the game until the very end.
A new version of chess has been invented by a Polish professor. The chess pieces move diagonally. Credit: Krakow University of Technology in Poland (PK
Chess is by no means a new board game. It was invented a long time ago, but the appearance of the board has evolved over time. It’s believed that the history of chess can be traced back nearly 1500 years. Chess originally came from Northern India. It was born out of the Indian game chaturanga before the 600s A.D. The board game quickly grew in popularity and spread to Persia. When the Arabs conquered Persia, chess was taken up by the Muslim world and subsequently spread to Southern Europe. In Europe, chess evolved into roughly its current form in the 15th century.
The chess version we are used today took time to develop. It was first in the mid-19th century that standardization of chess sets occurred. Before the 1850s, chess sets were not uniform at all.
The popular board game keeps inspiring players and inventors. The Krakow University of Technology in Poland (PK) has announced their employee has come up with a new version of chess, where the game is played diagonally. Dr. Zbigniew Kokosiński who a professor at the Faculty of Automatics and IT in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the PK is a huge chess fan.
Professor Kokosiński’s idea is original, and promising. Having gone through “The chess variant pages” online database, the researcher did not find any variation of the same form. The missing piece of the database was swiftly supplemented and now the Pole’s invention is set in stone, or bit, rather.
“The new method behind the gameplay is more engrossing than that of traditional chess. What is more, it allows beginners to play a [equal] game with seasoned partners,” the university wrote on its website.
The Polish Television reports that “in the game, pieces move diagonally across the standard chessboard which is also oriented diagonally with respect to the players. Fielded in the corners of the board, the pieces are arranged somewhat differently than in the well-known variant.
The kings are literally cornered and surrounded by other pieces. What is divergent from the standard pieces arrangement is that the queen stands in front of the king, who is in turn sided by a bishop and a knight. At the beginning of the game, the queen is also guarded by her own bishop and knight.
The diagonal game of chess is governed by new rules. Pawns can move in two directions (north-west and north-east) and attack south-, east- and west-wards unlike in the original.”
This new chess invention was a bit of a surprise as Professor Zbigniew Kokosiński accidentally discovered this new way of playing, trying to arrange the figures on the chessboard as a metaphor for the military forces of the Kaliningrad region.
Will the diagonal chessboard be as popular as the traditional one? Currently, it’s unknown but it may be fun to try it.
Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff