How To Play Trice's Chess

Each King in the diagram shown above is checkmated. Each Archbishop is issuing a check as a Bishop, while simultaneously denying flight squares via its Knight component.

Notice there are no other pieces in the vicinity of the conquered King. This makes the Archbishop one of the most underrated pieces in Trice's Chess. It is worth much more than the sum of its parts.

How the Archbishop Moves Pawns Knights Bishops Archbishops Chancellors Queens Kings

The animation above shows all of the moves available for a centralized Archbishop.

Notice there are 22 possible destinations for it from one square on an open board. Now try to imagine every square it could reach in 2 moves!

Being able to jump over pieces and change the color on which the Bishop component operates is a powerful combination unavailable in regular 8x8 chess.

The next sections show how to prepare to launch your Archbishop in the opening phase of the game.

Deploying Your Archbishop Properly Pawns Knights Bishops Rooks Chancellors Queens Kings

In the animated example shown above, you can see that each Archbishop is located in such a way as to defend the h-file from a potential incursion by an enemy Knight.

The white Archbishop defends the h2 square and the black Archbishop defends the h7 square.

If an enemy Knight gets too close, it could threaten capturing with check, then winning the Rook. This was also covered a great deal in the section describing the moves of the Knights at the bottom of that page.

In the opening phase of Trice's Chess, each side can try to thwart the kingside development of the other by employing this motif. A player must make a contingency plan for this.

A further elaboration of this notion is shown below.

At some point in time, the newcomer will have a "light bulb moment" when they realize you can deploy the Archbishop and still guard against a fork.

Almost without hesitation, they will make the move Af6 as shown above. From the f6 square, the black Archbishop guards h7 from a potential fork.

However, this satisfaction is short-lived, as white has Bg5 to chase away the Archbishop, since the white Knight on f3 protects the Bishop now on g5.

In most cases, black will have to suffer the indignation of retreating back to the g8 square to protect h7 from the dreaded knight fork.

So how should one deploy their Archbishop safely? Here's a short sample opening where both sides avoid the typical complications.

Watch the animation above and notice how placing the Archbishop onto the second rank in the f-file was the way both players chose to get their Archbishops into play.

1. d4 Nh6 2. Nh3 d5 3. f3 Nc6 4. g4 g6 5. Be3 Bg7 6. Bg2 f6 7. Nc3 Af7 8. Af2 O-O 9. O-O Bd7