Three-player chess

Three-player chess is a broad family of chess variants engineered to seat three competing players instead of the traditional two, and is also known as three-handed, three-man or three-way chess. Because a standard square board has no natural way to divide fairly among three sides, most variants replace it with a hexagonal board, a three-armed cross shape, or another symmetrical layout that links the center squares so all three armies have comparable access to the middle of the board. Each player commands one army, conventionally distinguished as white, black and red, and designers have long grappled with the format's central weakness, the tendency for two players to gang up on the third; some versions address this by ruling that whichever player first delivers checkmate wins outright while the player who was checkmated and the third, uninvolved player both lose. The variety of boards and rule tweaks produced under this banner reflects decades of attempts to translate chess's two-sided logic into a genuinely balanced three-sided contest.