Extinction Chess

Extinction Chess (official rules here) is one of the most fascinating chess variants. It comes from a very natural enhancement of the goal of the chess game, in that one wins by extincting one species in the opponent's pieces - for instance capturing both knights. With such a phrasing, standard chess can be defined as a kind of restricted Extinction Chess, where only the king's species is taken into account - you certainly know that the goal of chess is to extinct the opponent's king ! This variant manages to be in the same time different enough from standard chess in order to produce a lot of new ideas, but close enough as to keep the most positional features of chess, like pawn structures and space. A game where the chess skills are highly transposable, yet where it is vital to stay fully aware of the additional dangers.

Although it is not only a deep game, but also a very fun game, Extinction Chess is less popular on Brainking that I would have expected. I don't know the reason why, and am taking profit of this column to advocate this variant by annotating in detail one of the two best games I ever played. My opponent played it very well too, equalizing as Black, and then only failing to risk himself into an unpredictable position and falling into a passive one as the result of that choice. The game illustrates how easily an Extinction Chess is unbalanced, and how hard it is to overcome the slightest inaccuracies.

Remark about the notation

Although the rules of Extinction Chess state that there is no check or checkmate, I still find it to be a big help to add the check (+) and checkmate (#) symbols to the game notation, with the meaning that :

• A check is a threat to one of the opponent's pieces, which is the last of its kind - such a piece is to be considered as a royal piece as its loss would lose the game.


• A checkmate is an unstoppable such threat. Typical Extinction checkmates are double attacks on two last pieces (those are called forks), and attacks on one last piece, whose move would uncover another last piece (those could be called pins, but I prefer to call them skewers). And it is of course also possible to mate a piece in the good old-fashioned way, attacking it in such a way that it has no retreat.