Free 3-player chess on a hexagonal board

How to start

1. Open bigboard.games on every device and tap Start a table on one of them.
2. The others join by themselves on the same Wi-Fi; elsewhere, scan the QR code or type the four-letter code.
3. Lay the devices edge to edge, screens up, as the drawing shows, and pick the game.

The hexagonal board

Three-player chess here is played on a hexagonal board of 96 squares. Each player has the usual army in a home area of four ranks by eight files, along alternate edges of the hexagon, and each home area's fourth rank meets both neighbours' fourth ranks, files mirrored.

Lay three devices in a triangle with their top edges inward and each one shows its own sector in its true shape, with the neighbours' squares fading past its front edges. A phone shows its home area as a flat 8 × 4 grid instead, the same half a phone shows in chess on two phones.

Check, mate and a captured king

The rules are chess with one more player, one of many three-player chess variants. No move may leave your own king attacked by anyone. Checkmate knocks a player out at once, and the credit goes to whoever made the attack, even through a discovered line.

With three, a king can also be captured: when one player's move opens a line onto a king, the next player may take it before its owner can answer. Stalemate doesn't end the game; that player simply passes. Before the match, choose what happens to a fallen army: it freezes in place, the match ends there, or the army changes sides.

Laying out the three devices

A ring of three is the best shape. The players then go clockwise round it, so your neighbours really are on your left and right, and every piece keeps one size as it crosses from a phone onto a tablet. Three devices in a T work too.

Not everyone needs a device. Two people can share one, and a bot can take the third seat; either way, every device then shows the whole board, turned to its own player, and the layout stops mattering.

3 players: questions and answers