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Board games

Martian chess

Looney Labs, 1995

Martian chess is a board game published by Looney Labs in 1995. It is played with 2 to 4 players, from age 8 and in about 20 minutes.

players
2–4
minutes
20
years
8+

This game’s rules aren’t on Marquoir yet: keep the ones from the box. Marquoir keeps score, times your games and records them.

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The box

Publisher
Looney Labs
Designer
Andrew Looney
Artwork
Andrew Looney, Eileen Tjan
Year of release
1995
Official website
looneylabs.com

About the game

Martian Chess is an abstract strategy game for two or four players invented by Andrew Looney in 1999. It is played with Icehouse pyramids on a chessboard. To play with a number of players other than two or four, a non-Euclidean surface can be tiled to produce a board of the required size, allowing up to six players. In his review in Abstract Games Magazine, Kerry Handscomb stated: The first thing to note about Martian Chess is that it is not a chess-type game at all. Instead, the objective is to accumulate points by capturing pieces. Martian Chess is [...] an original game with novel tactics and strategy. In 1996, Looney had invented Monochrome Chess, a similar two-player game that uses regular chess pieces where the half of the board determined who controlled a piece. While the king is not royal, the king and rook can castle.
Excerpt from the Wikipedia article (CC BY-SA 4.0).

More from Looney Labs

Information from Marquoir’s game database, which cross-checks several open sources. Spotted a mistake? Write to us from the Contact page.