King of the hill
Standard chess with a finish line in the middle of the board. Your king stops being a liability and becomes the fastest way to win.
Updated
What this variant is
King of the hill is standard chess with one extra winning condition. Every piece moves as it always has, the starting array is the usual one, and castling, capture in passing and promotion are unchanged. The addition is a goal: the four squares in the middle of the board.
The hill
The hill is the four central squares, d4, e4, d5 and e5. If you make a legal move that puts your own king on any one of them, the game ends immediately and you have won. It does not matter how much material you are behind, or whether your opponent was about to mate you.
The word “legal” is doing the work. Every ordinary restriction still applies, and the important one is that a king may never move onto a square an enemy man attacks. So a central square that is covered, even by a single pawn, is not a way to win. Defending the hill means attacking those four squares, not occupying them, although a piece sitting on one does block it just as well.
Your king may travel through the middle without staying there. Nothing happens until it actually finishes a move on one of the four squares, so a king that steps onto e4 and is not captured has already won, while a king that merely passes through has not.
Winning
- Ending a legal move with your king on d4, e4, d5 or e5.
- Checkmate, exactly as in standard chess.
- Resignation, or the opponent running out of time.
Drawing
Stalemate is still a draw. So are agreement, threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule, and a timeout against an opponent with no mating material. Repetition and the fifty-move rule are applied automatically for both sides.
How it changes your play
- Castling is less attractive than usual, because it sends the king away from where the game is decided.
- Trading queens is dangerous rather than safe: with fewer pieces about, a king walk into the middle becomes much harder to stop.
- Knights are excellent defenders, because a single knight can cover two of the four squares at once.
- Watch for a king two moves away from the hill. That is a threat exactly like a mate threat, and it has to be answered now, not later.