Gliński's Hexagonal Chess

The game was invented by Władysław Gliński, a Polish journalist and engineer, who first publicly presented it around 1949. By the 1970s, it had become so popular in Poland that it was reportedly featured in its own dedicated magazines and clubs.

Instead of traditional squares, the game is played on a large hexagonal board consisting of 91 hex cells. The cells are colored using three distinct colors to ensure that no two adjacent cells share the same shade.

Each player commands an enlarged set of standard chess pieces, which notably includes an extra bishop per player to cover the three colors of the board. The pawns in this variant move differently than in standard chess, capturing diagonally on the hex grid.

In Gliński's variant, rooks move along any of the six straight lines of adjacent hexes on the board. This makes their movement patterns significantly different and visually more complex than the cardinal directions of traditional chess.