Courier chess: Difference between revisions

 

Sometime shortly after 1475, someone put the courier on the standard chessboard in place of the old alfil and gave the queen the combined powers of the courier and the rook.<ref>Murray 1913, pp.&nbsp;776&ndash;77; Eales 1985, p.&nbsp;72.</ref> This game was so much more exciting than medieval chess that it soon drove the older game off the market.<ref>Murray 1913, Chapter XI.</ref> Other improvements were tried out. One was an optional double first step for the pawns. This was at first restricted to the king's, queen's, and rooks' pawns, and then gradually extended to the others.<ref>Murray 1913, p.&nbsp;852.</ref>

 

In the early sixteenth century [[Lucas van Leyden]], in the Netherlands, painted a picture called ''The Chess Players'' in which a woman appears to be beating a man at courier chess.<ref>Murray 1913, p. 484. "A painting in the Königliches Museum, Berlin, said to have been painted in 1520 by Lucus von Leyden, shows a game of Courier in progress."</ref> [[Gustavus Selenus]] (Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg) in his 1616 book ''Das Schach- oder Königs-Spiel'', mentioned the Courier Game as one of three forms of chess played in the village of [[Ströbeck]] near [[Halberstadt]] in [[Sachsen-Anhalt]], Germany. He described it in detail, and gave drawings of the pieces. The names he gave the pieces do not always match the figures in the drawings: the piece called the ''Schleich'' is depicted as a court jester. In 1651 [[Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg]] and Duke of Prussia, gave to Ströbeck a playing board with chess on one side and the Courier Game on the other, and a set of silver pieces. These pieces were lent in the eighteenth century and never returned, but there is a set of wooden pieces. In 1821 H. G. Albers reported that courier chess was still played in Ströbeck, and that some [[chess piece|pieces]] had gained more powerful moves, but a few years later other visitors found that it had been abandoned.{{efn|''[[The Chess Variant Pages]]'' website at http://www.chessvariants.org/historic.dir/courierspiel.html mentions H. G. Albers, 1821, and George Hope Verney, ''Chess Eccentricities'', Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1885.}} In 1883, the local chess club revived it. Playing sets based on Lucas van Leyden's painting are commercially available.<ref name="lucas"/>