Castle Strife Games is a collection of 4 chess variants that also includes traditional chess (on the back of the quad-fold board). The Castle Strife Games website, CastleStrife.com, includes a full description and rules for all 4 variants: (traditional chess is Level 1), Castle Siege Chess (Level 2), Castle Action Chess (Level 3), Castle Attack Chess (Level 4), and the team game Castle Challenge Chess (Level 5). The games are for sale on Etsy.com. More information, including how to play, is on CastleStrife.com. Pictures of VCU students playing the games at the Chess Club at VCU can be seen at the Castle Chess Club meetup site. Castle Siege Chess has been programmed in Zillions of Games and can be played on a registered copy of Zillions of Games 2.0 or higher (maybe even 1.0). The latest version of the electronic game can be downloaded from my website CastleStrife.com. Click Castle Siege Chess on the home page and then click the Computer Games button in the header menu. The download links are in the middle of the page. You can then play the game either against the computer or another person by simply double-clicking the .zrf file for either the 590 pixel version for laptops or the 800 pixel one for larger monitors. It can even be played online through Zillions of Games. The circular chess board is actually a circular board merged with a square board in its center. Byzantine Chess (aka Circular Chess) is played on a 4 track circular board with a hole in the center. It has 2 directions of attack on the opponent's starting position. I (Rich VanDeventer, inventor, designer, developer, and publisher of Castle Strife Games) decided to merge a 6x6 square chess board into the hole and morph it into the inner ring of the circular board so that all chess paths progressed smoothly from the square area into the circular area. I ended up with 3 circular paths, 1 transition circular path, and a 4x4 square center and I named the board CirSquare 96 (it has 96 spaces). In merging a square with a circle, I could not avoid having 4 triangular spaces in the transition circle. Those 4 triangular spaces have turned out to be one of the main advantages of the board. Not only does the CirSquare 96 chess board have 3 directions (front and two sides) of attack (versus a traditional chess board's 1 direction of attack--frontal only) on the opponent's castle (starting area), but the 4 triangles provide a way for the Queen, Rook, and Bishop to gain a 5th direction of coverage when their paths pass through a triangular space, because they can exit either of the other two corners or sides (depending on how they entered the triangular space). The CirSquare 96 is exactly 50% larger than an 8x8 chess board. If all 24 spaces in each castle are used for pieces, it has exactly 50% more pieces than traditional chess. So the ratio of starting pieces to open spaces in the battlefield (the 4 rows of spaces between the castles) is 1:1, which is the same as traditional chess, so the board has the same feeling of openness at the beginning of the game. All the traditional chess pieces move the same as they do in traditional chess. You can also castle, if you use the standard setup for the traditional chess pieces. Since the board is 12 squares wide across the battlefield, there are 12 Pawns, which of course is 4 more than traditional chess. If you use only the standard 8 pieces of a traditional chess set that are not Pawns, there will be 4 spaces in the back of the castle that are open. That is how I initially played the game. It played very well, but felt too much like traditional chess. So I decided to come up with pieces to fill those 4 spaces. First, I used 2 more Knights and 2 more Bishops. That provided very strong armies, but it was not different enough for me. So started a search for medieval warriors that the traditional chess set was missing. I began looking at medieval war paintings and soon realized that the main things missing were Archers and Catapults

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