Keizár
- Board's Eye View
- Oct 2
- 3 min read
Designer Ákos Zubor and publishers Zuboard Games are very insistent that Keizár isn't Chess. You'd be forgiven tho' for thinking it might be a Chess variant because it is a two -player game played on an 8 x 8 square checker board and utilises standard Chess moves. Pieces are captured in the same way as in Chess but there is no checkmate in Keizár. Rather, this is an area control game where one of the squares near the centre of the board is designated as the Keizár square, and you win by occupying the square and holding onto it for three of your opponent's turns.
You start each game by creating the board. That means placing out alternating black and white tiles to form the modular checker board. The Keizár square is positioned close to the centre of the board and, scattered evenly but randomly positioned, will be tiles that show King, Queen, Bishop, Knight and Rook symbols. Aside from the Keizár win condition, this game's USP is that all 16 pieces on each side are pawns but they take on the identity and movement ability of another Chess piece if they start their move on a tile that shows that piece: so if you have a pawn on a square showing a Bishop, your pawn will on its next turn move and capture as if it was a Bishop. If it ends its turn on a square showing another Chess piece it will on its next turn move like that piece; if it is on a blank square, it reverts to being a pawn.
This makes for a highly dynamic game and, with its randomised set-up, it's a game that will play out differently every time. The trick is to spot the best strategy that the board offers for capturing and holding onto that all-important Keizár square. In our plays at Board's Eye View we found that occupying the Keizár square was always easy, but it was tough to then hold onto it for three turns. Most games have run to around 20-30 minutes and have followed an arc, with players initially set on capturing each other's pieces and attempting to hold onto commanding Chess-piece squares until the thinned-out pieces made it more feasible to successfully defend the Keizár square.
The game comes with markers to help players keep track of the number of turns the Keizár square has been held but the rules for the game are simple and straightforward. Assuming you know how each piece moves in Chess, gameplay in Keizár will seem intuitively easy. You just need to bear in mind that few of the 'exception' rules of Chess are applicable in this game. There's no castling and no en passant rule, and pawns that advance to the farthest rank just stay put there: there's no queening or other promotion. The game preserves the rule in Chess allowing pawns to move forward two squares on their first move - extending it to all the pawns in both your rows but excluding those Black pawns in the same column as the Keizár square and those in the adjacent column. This may seem fiddly but it serves to balance the fact that Black starts off closer to the Keizár square.
And tho' a pawn on a King square can take on the movement ability of a King, it can't be placed in check - indeed, it can simply be captured like any other piece. The main mental adjustment you'll need is to disregard the background colour of the Chess-piece tiles: there will, for example, be a white Queen tile and a black Queen tile but both are equally usable by either player's pawns.
Keizár is a highly strategic abstract game but it's by no means a dry game. We've had a lot of fun playing it!
