Eurasian Chess began with the idea of adding a Queen to Yáng Qí, my westernized Chinese Chess variant. But when I settled on the name of Eurasian Chess, the idea took on a life of its own. I conceived of the game as a synthesis of some of the main European and Asian forms of Chess, predominantly FIDE Chess and Chinese Chess. But I also based it on Grand Chess, created by Dutch game inventor Christian Freeling, and on the other five main regional variants from Asia, which are Shogi (Japan), Janggi (Korea), Makruk (Thailand), Sittuyin (Burma), and Shatar (Mongolia). Eurasian Chess includes all the pieces from Chess, except that it gives the King some properties of its counterpart in Chinese Chess. It includes the Cannon from Chinese Chess, and it includes the Vao, which Englishman T. R. Dawson created as the diagonal counterpart to the Cannon, which is to the Cannon as the Bishop is to the Rook. Although it contains fewer pieces from Chinese Chess than from Chess, it is still a fair balance between European and Asian variants, given that some of the other main regional variants in Asia are more like European Chess. In fact, of all the pieces in Eurasian Chess, the Queen is the only piece that is common to European variants but not found in any of the main Asian regional variants. Half of the pieces in Eurasian Chess are Chaturanga pieces shared by both FIDE Chess and between three and six of the six main regional variants in Asia. The eight-directional leaping Knight and the divergent Pawn are used in three Asian variants, the eight-directional King in five Asian variants, and the Rook in all six main Asian variants. The additional pieces are the Queen, which comes from Europe; the Cannon, which comes from China; the Bishop, which was created in both Europe and Japan; and the Vao, which is of mixed heritage, because it was created by a European who based it on the Chinese Cannon.
 
A full description of this game can be found at: http://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/eurasian.html
 
The artwork for the game combines characteristics of both European and Chinese sets. The board is checkered like a European board, but by using a floor tile technique, it has tiles intersecting in the middle of each space, so that pieces are also placed on points, as they are in Chinese Chess. The piece set displayed here uses disks for pieces, as is done in China, but uses western images. The western images are colored black and white, as European pieces normally are, but the disks are colored blue and red, which are commonly used for pieces in Chinese Chess. Besides the set shown here, the ZRF uses piece sets I have previously included with Yáng Qí and Chinese Chess.
 
 
For more games by Fergus Duniho, goto http://www.duniho.com/fergus/games