One of the widely played variants of Shatranj was
Shatranj al-husun, or Citadel chess. The description here is based on the
description in Gollon's book; in the
books of Pritchard and Murray a description of the game can also
be found. (Actually, most probably, all other sources base their information
on Murray's description.)
The game is played on a 10 by 10 board, which has four additional fields: the
citadels. There are several different opening setups, we give here only one;
for the others we refer to the other sources mentioned above.
The board looks like this:
Players have the usual pieces of Shatranj plus
two war machines, or dabbabah's, and two extra pawns.
The pieces move as follows:
King, knight (actually: Horse), rook (actually: chariot,
called: rukh) move as in FIDE-chess.
The general moves one square diagonally.
The elephant moves exactly two squares diagonally, and can jump the
intervening square.
The pawn (actually: soldier) moves as a normal pawn from FIDE-chess,
but does not have the possibility of a first double move.
Pawns promote to generals, when reaching the last row.
The war machine or dabbabah moves as a bishop from FIDE-chess.
r, n, e, w, k, g, p stand for rook, knight, elephant, war machine, king,
general, pawn. Lower case is white, upper case is black.
Other rules
When a king reaches a citadel at the opposite side of the board, the game
is drawn. A player wins the game, by mating or by stalemating his opponent.
This game has - in contrast to
Shatranj and some
of its variants, no `bare king' rule, i.e., the game continues normally
when one player has lost all its pieces but his king.