The problem with those variants is that they force the usual chess pieces in contexts where they don't really belong.
Rooks and bishops follow the obvious geometry of the square chessboard. Knights are the natural complement of rooks and bishops: they move to any of the closest squares neither a rook nor a bishop could reach.
Pawns defend each other and form the game's "structure".
Queens are rather arbitrary (you could have rook+knight or bishop+knight instead of rook+bishop), but a strong piece is needed to allow for dynamic play.
On an hexagon they don't really make sense. Is there a more "natural" set of pieces that's built on the geometry of an hexagon rather than being an awkward translation of the usual chess pieces?
Not specifically "hexagonal chess, but a very tactically similar hexagonal abstract strategy game called "Hive"[1] is very well regarded in the board game community and relevant to this discussion for anybody even tangentially interested.
Personally, I think it's more worth spending your time looking into that than yet another variant of chess. Also if you get a hankering to play it, it is available on boardgamearena online.
Hive is fantastic fun. I found it easy to learn, but that there was some strategic depth that really gave it replay value. An interesting aspect is that there isn't a board as such, rather the pieces together constitute the playing area which morphs as the game unfolds. It's a great on-the-go game since the pieces are tough and it's a convenient size to be chucked in a bag for the beach, train journeys, etc.
The moves described in the video seemed like they were decent analogues to me. The bishop moved along the same color and could attack rooks and knights from safety and could slide between pieces. Rooks could attack bishops and knights safely. Knights could attack rooks and bishops and queens safely.
What specifically did you think was way out of context?
If you watch the video, you'll find that on a hexagon, things make no less sense than on a grid and the folks who worked out hexagonal chess actually did a pretty great job preserving all those roles. Your brain just isn't use to hexagon logic.
I think it would be cool if the base of the chess piece was a triangle instead of a circle and orientation mattered. So you could introduce a new move into the game which is picking up a piece and twisting it 60 degrees to put you on a different axis of the hexagon. This opens up three new directions (sides 2, 4, and 6) and closes the previous three (sides 1, 2, and 3).
I find it kind of hilarious that whites first move can be 1. Qb4, past their beginning pawn wall, and staring right that blacks queen through blacks pawn wall, and where it is immediately taken by black’s first move: 1... Qxb4
Rooks having 3 directions in hexagonal chess is "as naturally built on the geometry of a hexagon", as rooks having 2 directions in square chess. I have no idea what you're objecting to.
One thing that bothers me about these rules is that the Pawn's definition of diagonal doesn't match that of the Bishop/Queen/King's. The pawn is able to capture "to either side", but the other pieces consider diagonal to be the hexes of the same color (a more convincing argument IMO). Perhaps that extra movement gave too much of a boost to pawn advances?
Polgars star chess has solved this by using adjacent fields as diagonal fields. The orientation of the board is as such, that there are 3 axes, North-South (Vertical), Northwest-Southeast and Southwest-Northeast (the diagonals). Using this approach, bishop and pawn move alongside the same diagonals, one loses however the "color" aspect of the bishop (i.e. the bishop can reach every field). Polgar's rook can then only move vertically, not to the side. The queen moves in all 6 directions of the hexagon. This leads to an interesting game dynamics where the bishop actually feels more like a rook, and the rook resembles the Lance in shogi.
In the almost Chess domain, I loved the 3M/Avalon Hill game 'Feudal', which was Chess-like but with more types of pieces, more complex movements, and terrain types.
But there is the possibility of betrayal and switching sides. In a winner takes all game as soon as one player looks like they’re winning the weaker players have an incentive to gang up on them.
The story of how Diplomacy was invented is interesting: they were playing the card game Hearts and discussed how it would change the game balance if players were encouraged to team up against the person with the low score.
The Duke is another chess variant I'm fascinated by. It's still on rectangular grid, with more varied rules for each piece movement and attack patterns. What I find interesting is that these rules are inscribed on game pieces themselves. Some pieces even change their patterns after their action, by flipping over their tile and exposing the alternate pattern. I find this concept of game rules moving around the board alluring for some reason.
I’m compelled to mention the board game hex. It’s excellent, print a paper board and get some colored pencils/marks and play a few rounds with a friend. It’s great.
It doesn't make sense to me why pawns attack on a file (adjoining hexagons) rather than diagonal (hexagon pointed to but separated by the side between two others).
I say this not as a "you should have searched", but because it's fun. There are thousands of chess variants in the world ( https://www.chessvariants.com/Gindex.html ) and it's amazing where this simple game can be taken.
My, how search got bad nowadays! I did a cursory search but got nothing interesting.
Thanks for link! However that chess board is only hyperbolical in the center. A real hyperbolical chess would have five neighbors in each cell. That's a real mind-bender.
I've also seen several different variants for chess on a torus (imagined -- still played on a flat board, but you play as if each edge is connected to the opposite one). Pieces end up having basically the same allowed moves (IIRC the only required change is that a piece making a move where it loops around the board and back to its original position is disallowed), but a different initial setup is required, because given the regular one, both sides start the game already check-mated. For further brain-bending, you can do a Klein bottle instead of a torus.
I want to share https://www.pychess.org/ as well - while it doesn't have hexagonal chess, it has tons of variants and you can play both against the computer (that runs fairy stockfish - an engine that works with many chess variants) and against human players
My current favorite is https://www.pychess.org/variants/empire - it's been designed to be wildly asymmetric but actually the balance between the two armies are more even than regular chess' white vs black pieces.
My problem is that there is no literature, no published theory on most chess variants. At least I can't find any theory on empire ehess, and thus I have to develop strategies on my own - but that's how I played chess 20 years ago and it was awful.
The best part of chess IMO is the social aspect of having an evolving theory (or as other games call it, an evolving metagame), and the way we can learn theory to be able to quickly assess who is winning at a given position (a highly nontrivial task), or assess whether a move is "natural" or not.
Rooks and bishops follow the obvious geometry of the square chessboard. Knights are the natural complement of rooks and bishops: they move to any of the closest squares neither a rook nor a bishop could reach.
Pawns defend each other and form the game's "structure".
Queens are rather arbitrary (you could have rook+knight or bishop+knight instead of rook+bishop), but a strong piece is needed to allow for dynamic play.
On an hexagon they don't really make sense. Is there a more "natural" set of pieces that's built on the geometry of an hexagon rather than being an awkward translation of the usual chess pieces?