Chess Variants Are Everywhere

The Chess.com forum, Chess960 and Other Variants, used to be one of my favorite sources for new developments about chess960. These days the forum is less about chess960 and more about the other variants, with new threads mainly signalling the start of a game using some weird variant. When one of those variants popped up on Flickr, I used the opportunity to investigate it.

Chess on an Infinite Plane © Flickr user QyiQ23607 Pisano under Creative Commons.

The description said,

This image was created by Cardin Knowles, and is a representation of the game "Chess on an Infinite Plane".

This was followed by a link to a recent game in the chess960 forum: Chess on an Infinite Plane (Naviary vs. captaintugwash), where the first post in that thread copies the rules of the variant. It turns out that the Cardin Knowles mentioned in the description and the Naviary playing White in the linked game are one and the same person: Cardin Knowles (Naviary) - Chess Profile (chess.com).

As for the variant, it's important enough to earn a page on Wikipedia, Infinite chess (wikipedia.org), and on the main site for chess variants, Chess on an Infinite Plane (chessvariants.com). On top of that, the Flickr page links to Flickr groups that go beyond chess, like:-

• Math Is Everywhere,
• Game Concepts, and
• Game Theory

Back to the Flickr image, the piece in the four corners protected by a shield of Pawns is called a 'Hawk', which happens to be everything I know about infinite chess.