Chamæleon

Chamæleon is a chess derivative invented in 1982 by the Erfurt teacher Wolfgang Großkopf. It is a game which carries to an extreme the idea of pieces whose power to move and capture depends on the field they are on (cf. Lumberjack).

(This description is based on the chapter `Vorsicht, Blaue Damen!' in Jürgen Göring's Knobeln und Tüfteln: Labyrinth der Denkspiele, Berlin: Neues Leben, 1987.)

Chamæleon board.The Board

Chamæleon is a game for two to four, played on a chessboard whose squares are painted in four colours (red, green, yellow and blue), as shown on the diagram. In the original description each player's pieces are marked by one of the same four colours; I see no advantage in that, however, so I use different colours on the diagram. (My board is also checkered, but only for ease of observation. That has no relevance for the game; it's the colouring that matters.)

Each player has four pieces, each of which can move and capture as a queen, a rook, a bishop or a knight does in chess, depending on the colour of the square it is on. More precisely, each player has:

The idea behind this is that if something moves as a light (or heavy) piece on a square of a warm (or cold) colour, then it moves as the other light (or heavy) piece on a square of the other warm (or cold) colour; and vice versa.

In a physical game set the pieces will most likely be cubes of the player's colour, with the four ranks marked on four of the sides in red, green, yellow and blue and the other two sides left blank, and they will always sit on the board with the active side up.

With respect to the beginning of the game there are two variants:

  1. The game starts with every player's pieces arranged in the left half of the line closest to him, each on a square on which it moves as a knight (as shown on the diagram).
    1. Consider the first move of the player with the white pieces (assuming he is the one who starts the game). If he chooses to open the game by moving his Nd1, he has a choice of four possible moves:

    If there are only three players, one of the sets of pieces is removed; if there are two, two sets are removed, and the remaining two start the game from opposite sides of the board.

  2. The game starts with an empty board, and each player in turn drops a piece onto any empty square; this is done four times, after which the actual moving and capturing can start.

The right of play is passed on clockwise.

An additional rule concerns the shrinking of the board. If the move of a piece results in vacating an entire end line (rank or file), that line disappears from the board immediately (as if it were broken off), together with any adjacent vacant lines. (Cf. Shrink Chess, where lines also disappear from the middle of the board when vacated.) The board may not, however, be reduced to fewer than three ranks or fewer than three files.

Everyone plays against everyone else. A player who has lost all his pieces leaves the game, which continues until only the winner retains one or more of his pieces.


Created and maintained by Ivan A Derzhanski.

Last modified: 26 January 1999.