My son and I play chess regularly and today he came up with an innovative new variation of chess called Hide Chess!

I was amazed by this variation of Chess and I immediately played a full game of Hide Chess with him.

He calls it Hide Chess because the starting position of the coins on the board is hidden from the opponent and is strategically placed at the place that you rightly feel – on your side of the board. (Since we have a magnetic chess board, it was quite easy to implement this starting position).

So the rules of the game goes as follows:

1. When the game begins each player places their coins on their side of the board, without showing them to their opponents. (A way of implementing this in real life is to allow the players to write down their starting positions for each coin and submit it at the beginning of the game.)
2. As always, white moves first and from then on the game continues exactly as the regular chess game.
3. The other significant change in the rules between traditional Chess and Hide Chess is that in Hide Chess the pieces need not follow the traditional Chess positioning rules. Eg. Two bishops can be placed in black squares, two soldiers can be in the same file at the start,etc. In short, the pieces can be placed wherever the player wishes to place them.

I played with black and he played with white. As soon as the game started, and both of us disclosed our positions, I was astonished by the thrill and the variation Hide Chess brought into the game of Chess. I felt like it was the 20-20 version of Chess, while he had no clue about his best innovation so far (from my view).

Note: Please ignore the board above, as I am still trying to get the starting position represented on this blog – did not realize the Hide Chess rules are slightly different from Chess. Updating the rules given above now.

If you are a chess lover, and if you are open to variations, please do let me know your thoughts on Hide Chess. In any case, I am pleasantly surprised and happy to have played the first game ever on Hide Chess 🙂