Playing chess with dice

Chess with dice

There are many chess variants that you can try to spice up a regular chess game and playing chess with dice is one of them. Dice are a fun way to add another level on the classic board game of chess. A 6-sided dice are perfect because it just happens that chess also has exactly 6 different kinds of pieces. There are a few different variations of dice chess but the basic difference to normal chess is that before every move, a player must roll 2 dice (or just one) and move a piece according to one of the dice numbers.

• 1 – Pawn
• 2 – Knight
• 3 – Bishop
• 4 – Rook
• 5 – Queen
• 6 – King

Rules of dice chess

There is no standard set of rules for dice chess and you can make up your own rules combining the ones you think work best.

• Each player must roll a dice before their move to see which pieces he/she is allowed to move. With a game of two dice, a player can choose which number piece to move and if he rolls a double, he can decide to move any piece;
• If a player is not able to move any piece legally, a turn is passed to the opponent. There is no checkmate in dice chess and the goal is to capture the opponent’s king;
• A player is able to castle rolling a 4 or a 6 or roll doubles in a 2-dice game;
• En passant works like in regular chess, you must roll a 1 or doubles and you can only make the move right after the opponent’s pawn move;
• A player is able to promote a pawn to a piece number they rolled, for example if they roll a 3, they are able to promote a bishop even without rolling a 1;

Playing chess with dice

As playing chess with dice is a fairly unknown format of chess, it is not really supported on any of the major chess servers but you are able to play it on BrainKing.com. To play chess with dice at home, you can simply use a regular chess board and use one or two dice to let the faith decide which piece you need to move next.

If you want to read more about chess variants, check out our list of the most popular ones.