Knightmare Chess

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Knightmare Chess 2 cover art.

The card called Demotion.

Knightmare Chess is a fantasy chess variant published by Steve Jackson Games (SJG) in 1996. It is a translation of a French game Tempête sur l'échiquier ("Storm on the Chessboard"), designed by Pierre Cléquin and Bruno Faidutti.

Knightmare Chess is played with cards that change the default rules of chess. The cards might change how a piece moves, move opponent's pieces, create special squares on the board or do something even wilder. For example, a card called Demotion says:

Replace one of your opponent's pieces (except a King or Queen) with one of his captured Pawns.

Play this card on your turn, instead of making a regular move.

There are two sets of cards sold separately, both consisting of 80 cards. The sets are known as Knightmare Chess 1 (ISBN 1-55634-332-9) and Knightmare Chess 2 (ISBN 1-55634-348-5) but there's nothing at all to prevent one from just shuffling both decks into one 160 card deck. SJG also sells blank cards, to be customized as the player wishes, in packs of 20.^[1]

The graphics in the English version of the Knightmare Chess cards are dark fantasy style, nightmarish (hence the pun Knightmare) color paintings by Brazilian artist Rogerio Vilela. The French original version had a cartoonish tone, unlike the English version, and the cards in the French original version are also different from the English version.

Another innovation of the American version is to include rules for "dueling deck" play, where each player has his own customized deck, possibly built from multiple copies of the set if desired. In SJG's version, each card is marked with a point cost. The total chaotic power of one's personal deck can be measured in the sum of the points of all cards in the deck. For a balanced game each player uses the same point total, or a stronger player can use a lower point total as a handicap. Cards which are too powerful to appear more than once per side are marked with an asterisk, indicating that a player can only put one copy of that specific card in his deck.