Knight Relay Chess

Author: King Reza

OK. As you see I am in check. Generally, there are a few ways to cancel a check:

• You can move your King to a safe square if any exists.
• You can capture the checking piece if possible.
• You can move a piece of yours in between your King and the checking piece so that it ‘blocks’ the check.

According to the position of the board, your choices may vary. It’s always a good idea to pay attention to the side effects of a move you’re making to cancel a check. Sometimes, choosing the wrong method of canceling a check leads you to worse problems. So choose carefully what you want to do. Here I chose to move my King to a safe square:



As you can see, right now I have a good material advantage and my position is very strong too. I have two Pawns that can easily move with the help of my three Knights and promote to precious Queens. So as you see, it was a very good idea promoting that Pawn to a Knight. The more Knights you have, the faster your pieces can move and the more possibilities of movement they have and thus the harder the game for your opponent to manage!

Author: King Reza

The board a couple of moves later:



It’s the 12th move and it’s my turn. It doesn’t seem so, but my Queen is under attack by the White Bishop on d3. I moved it to a5. D6 could have been an option, but White could respond by moving his Bishop on d3 to c5 threatening my Queen again.

It’s a basic rule. Don’t waste your moves. If I had made Qd6, then White would start advancing his position and what I could do was just flee.

Author: King Reza

I think explaining the techniques while talking about a game is more understandable than just saying do this, do that! So I’ll be pasting different parts of the game and then I’ll talk about each part.



White played 4.Be2 which seems to be a good move giving him the opportunity to castle and also giving him a Bishop + Knight on e2. However, my opponent never castled in this game!

I played 4.Qd6. Another good move would have been 4.Bd7. But I like it when I have my Queen on the board. It’s very powerful especially when accompanied by a Knight.

So as you see, I’m trying to get my pieces into the board so that I can benefit from their abilities.

Author: King Reza

Since BrainKing.com is asking players to write articles, I thought it would be a good idea to write about Knight Relay Chess which is a very interesting variation of Chess and brings extra thinking and fun to the games. I am pretty good at playing that game and will try to share some, of course not all, of my knowledge with you who are interested in learning how to play the game and improving your skills at it.

I’ll start with the rules. Basically, Knight Relay Chess has the same rules of regular Chess, meaning that pieces move like they do in Chess, etc But when a piece is located in a square covered by a friendly Knight, meaning that Knight could move to that square if the piece weren’t there, it gets the moving abilities of a Knight as a bonus. So if that piece is a pawn, now it is a pawn plus a Knight at the same time.

So, assuming that a player has made 1.E4, if the player moves his/her Knight to C3 the next move, he/she will be having a Pawn + Knight on E4. This is true even if the player first makes 1.KC3 and then moves the pawn to E4.

There’s more to the Knights than just that. They cannot be captured. So neither can you take your opponent’s Knights nor can they take yours. Not only can’t your Knights be captured, but also they cannot capture any pieces either. The Knights don’t put the Kings in check . So you can safely say that the only thing they do, up to this step, is that they give extra moving abilities to the pieces.

It’s worth mentioning that this extra moving ability is NOT permanent. So if you move the Knight to a square that no longer covers your piece’s location, the piece loses its extra moving abilities and becomes what it originally was. This is true if you move the piece to a square not covered by a Knight too.

Now, let’s start with different strategies.