New dimensions for chess devotees

Press, 23 March 1985, Page 21

New dimensions for chess devotees

From

LAURENCE MARKS

in London

A variation of chess played with 36 pieces on a six-sidea board was launched commercially at the Nuremberg Toy Fair this week. Its inventor, London businessman Wladyslaw Glinski, says that more than 400,000 people world wide are already playing it on makeshift boards, and that its strategic innovations have established it as a serious alternative to the traditional game. Mr Glinski, aged 64, was born in Kartuzy, close to Poland’s Baltic coast, where his father was town clerk. As a high school chess-player in the late 19305, he began experimenting with new rules. He did so because although thy number of

combinations of moves in chess is astronomical, the possibility of developing entirely new gambits at this stage of its history is small. “Chess-players today no longer have the chance of discovering something for themselves,” he says. “They can only memorise what has already been discovered. In championship chess whichever player has the better memory will tend to win, unless he makes a serious error. Grandmasters who know

everything find themselves facing one another. They are stuck — as Karpov and Kasparov were stuck at the world championships in Moscow, playing each other into a state of mental exhaustion. The attraction of hexagonal chess is that everything is still to be discovered.”

Mr Glinski is not, of course, the first chess revolutionary. Fairy chess, as it is called, is almost as old as the game its*lf. Capablanca

invented a version played with 40 pieces on a 100-square board. Others have developed games for two, three and four players on round, cruciform and even cylindrical boards. There is three-dimen-sional chess, and something called Amazons which is played with 10 knights on each side. They have

remained curiosities, unable to challenge the intellectual elegance and fascination of the original. “I played chess every day as a boy,” says Mr Glinski. “I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t enough for me. I asked myself: is there something that would extend the possibilities of the game? I eventually recog-

nised that, if you play on a square board, that’s it. It’s perfect. You can’t really improve on it. So I began experimenting with other shapes.” In hex chess, the board has 91 hexagonal cells in three colours; light, medium and dark. There are two extra bishops and an extra pawn on each side. They line up at the start in a diamond-shaped phalanx: pawns in front, the more powerful pieces at the back, the

bishops one behind the other in the centre. The king and queen can move in 12 directions instead of eight, bishops and rooks in six instead of four. “On the hexagonal board, the pieces have much greater freedom,” says Mr Glinski. “In square board chess, there’s always the problem of getting the rooks' out of the corners. Castling moves one rook to the centre, but the other is still trapped. In hex chess, both

rooks can reach the middle of the board in two or three moves. “What I’ve done is to transfer traditional chess to a different battlefield. It’s like jungle warfare: you have to be ready for quick action in response to unexpected attack. Square board chess is more like desert warfare: you can see every attack when it’s miles away.” Mr Glinski migrated to Britain with General Anders' Polish 2nd Corps at the end of World War 11. He finalised the rules in 1972 and set about propagating his invention. —Copyright. London Observer Service.