Canadian publishers 3JoyGames have developed a niche market in novel chess variants. While others have explored fairy chess pieces that move or take differently to those in the standard game, 3JoyGames have stuck with conventional chess pieces and have instead experimented with alternative chess boards. We previously featured Chess Diamond, with its irregular board and Chess 90 Degrees, where players' pieces start off at right angles to each other. The twist in Chess 2vs2 is that the conventional 8 x 8 board is replaced with an 8 x 16 board.
As you might guess from the name of the game, the idea of the larger board is to faciliate a four-player version of the game. Others have attempted this before - notably George Hope Verney, who in 1881 designed a four-player Chess variant using a 14 x 14 board from which the four 3 x 3 corners had been excised. Hammerdog Games' Warlord Chess, which we featured on Board's Eye View back in 2018, was built around a variation of Verney's design.
With Chess 2vs2, designer Slimane Bakelli has taken a very different approach, and not just over the shape of the board. This variant creates Chess as a team game for two teams where each player has their own conventional set of 32 pieces. There are two different ways of setting the game up and playing. In 2vs2 Faceoff, the team members set their pieces up side by side so that they start off with adjacent rooks in the middle of the 16 x 8 'landscape' board. All moves are the same as those in conventional chess, except of course that the pieces can range over the much wider playing area. You can take the pieces of either of your opponents but not those of your team mate. You can either play till either of your opponents' kings are checkmated or you can play to two checkmates, removing all pieces of the first captured king.
In 2vs2 Surrounded, the board is in 'portrait' mode with one team setting up their pieces at both ends of the board and the other back-to-back in the middle. Tho' the pawns only move forward, other pieces can range across the whole board, so a player at the north end of the board could find their king threatened by pieces from both of the players who started off in the central area. Again, you can either play to a single checkmate (which we've preferred) or you could play till both of your opponents' kings have been captured.
Both of these 2vs2 variants create their own exciting dynamics but both are similar enough to the standard two-player game to still appeal to conventional Chess players, and especially to players who enjoy solving Chess problems. And if you just want to explore the novel dynamics but don't want to play Chess as a team game, you can play both Faceoff and Surrounded as two-player games where a single player controls both of the sets of pieces. Aside from the unconventional board, Chess 2vs2 comes with four complete sets of plastic Staunton Chess pieces in whiter, black, maroon and green, each in their own cloth bag.