The next level, Musketeer Chess

by Dr Zied Haddad
(Paris, France)

Chess suffers nowadays from draws and less spectacular games. Musketeer Chess helps to fix this opening the path to new strategies, more tactics, much more spectacular play. Play uses a classic chess set, and adds two new pieces dropped during the game in a way respecting the general spirit of a chess game. These new pieces spice up the game, helps getting rid of opening theory to focus on thinking and elaborating strategies on the board. When the new pieces are exchanged, the games becomes a normal chess game, with the exception that a Pawn can promote to the newly added pieces. The game is still a chess game but the new elements make it much more than that. A fun to play chess variant.

Step 1: First Musketeer piece selection

White chooses the first Musketeer piece by positioning it on the White start position labeled "1". The same Black piece is automatically moved to Black start position "1".

Step 2: Second Musketeer piece selection

Black has 2 possibilities:

1. He chooses the second musketeer piece among the 9 remaining possibilities by positioning it on the Black start position labled "2".


2. He refuses White choice by putting the first selected piece back to its original position. In this case, the 2 musketeer pieces will be Cannon and Leopard.

Step 3: Placing Musketeer pieces


White places his 1st musketeer piece on row 0.
Black places his 1st musketeer piece on row 9.
White places his 2nd musketeer piece on row 0.
Black places his 2nd musketeer piece on row 9.

Exception: you can not place one musketeer piece behind a Rook and the other behind the King.

Step 4: Play Time

Standard chess rules apply for classic pieces.

Musketeer pieces enter the game when the position right in front of them is freed by a move. If the piece in front of a musketeer piece is captured before it entered the game, the musketeer piece is also removed from the board.


Try it online at Musketeer Chess

You’ll find there tools to edit chess variant diagrams and more chess variants.