BRIGHTER CHESS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 5, 7 January 1930, Page 14

BRIGHTER CHESS

SUGGESTED CHANGE

NO ALTERATION IN RULES

A suggestion ..to change a game which has remained unchanged for over 1000 years is made in Hexagonal Chess, by H. D. Basherville, just published by Basil Blackwell, of Oxford, says an overseas paper. ■

"The man in the street," says Mr. Bashervilla in his introduction, "has long since become indifferent to a game which cannot be played in even an elementary manner without devoting to the study or the great players of the Dast an amount of time and intellectual energy that would suffice for the mastery of a branch of science, and, as a natural consequence, the game interests a far smaller circle today than it did.even, one generation ago. "More significant still, the chess champion is also beginning to feel that the intensive methods of research that have been applied to the game during the last century, and the vast literature which they have produced, so cramp the excursions of his genius that he is now willing to join with the man in the street in a call for changes that will sweep away the debris of the past, and leave a fair field wherein all can start level and the best man will win.

"It is not that chess, as we have hitherto knownit, is too difficult, or the field o£ its combinations too vast. On the contrary, the trouble is that the field is sufficiently limited to admit of its being worked over in detail almost to the point of exhaustion. :

' "The last few years have, therefore, seen a number of suggestions for the improvement of the game, but so far it does not seem to have occurred to anyone that a more radical reformation can be effected by constructing a new board composed of geometrical figures other than squares. Yet there is nothing about a square to make it the only possible figure on which the game can be played. Both triangles and hexagons can be arranged in a continuous pattern free from the interstices that result from an attempt, to group together circles, octagons, or other ■ geometrical, figures. Triangles can be ruled out at once for reasons; that will, appear to anyone who tries to construct a playable board out of them, but hexagons can be grouped into a board far surpassing tho square chessboard in the complexity and beauty of the combinations which it makes possible. Hexagonal Chess, then, is an attempt to reconstruct the game of chess in terms

of hexagons instead o£ squares. The chess-! men remain the same, and their moves and powers are, as far as possible, analogous to their moves and powers in ordinary chess. The hexagonal board is only slightly larger than the ordinary board, having 83 hexagons as against 64 squares, but the fact that each space has six sides instead of four opens out a vast new field of combinations of fascinating complexity and peculiar beauty, wherein the learning of dead chess players will no longer avail, but sheer intellectual power _ will immediately and without preliminary study come into its own. ■ The rules of the new game are not-dis-similar from those of the old, but there are no moves in hexagonal' chess corresponding to "castling" and "taking ■ en passant" in ordinary chess. \-''..