Petteia - The Mother of Chess

Chess is the child. This is the Mother. Petteia is a strategy board game, and a chess game at heart, played on a 10x10 board, with ten pieces and ten pawns a side, and one piece that chess never inherited. Learn Petteia and something strange happens when you go back to chess. The board feels small. The lines feel short. Players describe it as chess game getting easier, and it is not hard to see why: you have been thinking across a hundred squares, and eight by eight is a smaller room. What would it feel like to find chess easy? THE SNAKE: THE PIECE CHESS NEVER GOT Chess gives you two kinds of movement. The rook, bishop and queen slide in straight lines. The knight jumps in an L, and that is as strange as chess ever gets. The Snake is stranger. It does not slide and it does not jump. It winds. It travels outward along eight curving paths, each one bending as it goes, ending in squares that no rook, no bishop and no queen can ever reach. It can strike at the end of its journey or partway along it. It can slip past a piece that would stop anything else dead. So here is the question every chess player asks within about ten minutes of meeting it: does this piece sit between the rook and the queen? Or is it something chess simply has no answer for? You will have an opinion. Most people change it twice. A KING THAT SACRIFICES ITS OWN Once per game, your King may take the square of 'one of its own' neighbouring pieces, removing it from the board. Your own soldier, given up by your own King, to escape a position that should have killed you. Nothing in chess does this. It changes what losing means. NOBODY KNOWS WHO IS GOOD AT THIS YET Petteia has resurfaced. There are no opening books. No memorised lines. No centuries of theory to grind through. The grandmasters of this game have not been born yet, and the honest question is whether they will be chess masters at all. Will the players who dominate here be the ones with a lifetime of chess pattern recognition? Or complete newcomers, free of chess habits, whose minds take to a winding piece and a hundred squares more naturally than a trained player ever could? Right now, nobody knows. You could be either one. The leaderboard is wide open and the top of it is empty. FOR PLAYERS WHO HAVE NEVER TOUCHED CHESS You do not need to know chess to start. You are not behind. You may be ahead. The quick tutorial teaches every piece from nothing, with a board and a diagram on every page. No jargon, no assumed knowledge. Learn Petteia first and chess tends to come easily afterwards, which is the opposite of the order everyone expects. FOR PLAYERS WHO ALREADY KNOW CHESS The short tutorial covers only what is different: the Snake, the King's sacrifice, and pawns that open with one, two or three squares. Everything else you already know still works. Your tactics still work. Your endgames mostly do not, and that is the fun part. HOW YOU PLAY - Offline against the computer, from gentle to demanding - Pass and play against someone in the room with you - Online rated chess-style matches, with a rating that rises and falls on results - A global leaderboard, currently wide open - Friends, live games you can watch as they happen, and in-game chat - Hints, threat arrows, takebacks and an evaluation bar while you are learning - Move timers from seconds per move up to days - Play with familiar chess pieces, or the Petteia set: King, Minister, Elephant, Camel, Horse and Snake Works offline. Works on a plane. Works anywhere. Petteia - The Mother of Chess. A board game, a strategy game, a chess game with more room to think, and a hundred squares of territory nobody has mapped yet. Where will you rank while the theory is still unwritten?