Five games, one board room
Chess did not appear from nowhere, and it did not stop travelling when it reached Europe. The games here share an ancestor or a border with one another, except the tafl games, which grew up entirely apart.
Choose a game
Chess
The game the whole western line ends at, and the one most people mean by "chess". Eight ranks, sixteen pieces a side, and more written about it than any other board game alive.
8 rule setsShatranjXiangqi
Chinese chess. Pieces sit on the intersections, a river runs across the middle, and each general is confined to a nine-point palace he may never leave.
2 rule setsChinese chessJanggi
Korean chess. The same grid as xiangqi with no river, palaces you can cut across diagonally, a cannon that must always leap, and a setup you choose before the first move.
2 rule setsKorean chessShogi
Japanese chess, and the reason its games rarely peter out: a piece you capture changes sides and comes back, dropped anywhere you like.
9 rule setsJapanese chessHnefatafl
The Norse game, and the odd one out here: the two sides are not playing the same game. Attackers outnumber defenders two to one; the defenders only have to get their king out.
6 rule setsTafl
How these games are related
One line runs west from northern India and becomes chess. Another runs east and becomes xiangqi, janggi and shogi. Tafl belongs to nobody in that story.
Western chess and its ancestors, the Asian chesses, and the Norse tafl games.