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.
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.More from Looney Labs
- Fluxx zombie · 2007
- Aquarius (jeu de cartes) · 1998
- Are You the Traitor ? · 2009
- Button Men · 1999
- Chrononauts · 2000
- Cosmic Coasters · 2000
Information from Marquoir’s game database, which cross-checks several open sources. Spotted a mistake? Write to us from the Contact page.