Turkish Great Chess and Chinese Whispers: Misadventures of a Chess Variant

The document examines Turkish Great Chess (šaṭranǧ-i kabīr), a 52-piece Ottoman chess variant, and how its rules became distorted as they passed through Western sources. Its central thesis is that the earliest reliable account, an 1806 Turkish text printed in 1805–6 and reviewed in 1808, is sufficient to refute the errors that accumulated in later European references, even though that original source alone does not allow the game to be played without reconstruction. The authors trace the garbling through German accounts from 1808 onward, where conflicting interpretations of the gazelle's leap and the rhinoceros's move emerged, and through a chain of secondary works, including van der Linde (1874–1881), Murray (1913), Gollon (1968), and Cazaux and Knowlton (2017), each adding unsupported details about board size, piece movement, and setup. A plausible mechanism for this drift is the misreading of the "elephant" as the rook, a confusion that spread through subsequent texts.

Drawing on the Ottoman source, the authors propose a reconstructed ruleset: a 13x13 board, a queen-plus-knight "great vizier," a 3-1 leaping gazelle, and a king permitted one knight-style leap. Their final proposal is a reformed variant that retains orthochess pawn promotion and stalemate-as-draw rules, replaces the king's leap with a castling-like exchange of king and rook inspired by 19th-century Turkish practice as reported by Falkener (1892), and offers subvariants to balance the two queen-like pieces, including symmetric orthoqueen arrays, short-queen arrays, and a short superqueen (K+R+N) option. These later sections present design proposals rather than empirical findings, supported by historical reconstruction and a reference list.