What is triangular chess?

[1]

If you’ve seen Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory give his roomie Leonard, a hard time with his antics, you must have surely noticed his giant-sized chess board. Unlike a regular chess board, this hexagonal chess board consists of 96 triangular cells and was originally designed for two players.

Developed by George R. Dekle Sr. in 1986, this chess board consists of three extra pawns and a unicorn. Later on, in the same year, Dekle came up with a variation for three players.
Triangular chess has found popularity among geeks and is often looked upon as a game with higher level of difficulty after regular chess. This form of chess isn’t drastically different from your regular chess board except for special move patterns. Triangular chess too has variants within itself and one can develop new patterns and movements. For example, one could modify the number of triangles and accommodate more than two players also.
In triangular chess, a rook moves in a straight line starting through an edge in three possible directions. The bishop too moves in a straight line starting through a cell vertex. One of the most authoritative figure, the queen moves as a rook or bishop in six directions. This is not all. The king moves one step as a queen. A knight moves in a pattern similar to the bishop and then takes one step as a rook in an orthogonal direction.
Harsh Kumar, an avid chess player says that his friends developed their own version of triangular chess at their hostel during their engineering days. “We loved playing chess and realised that only two of us could play at a time. That’s when we read up about triangular chess and realised we could accomodate a third player too. Considering the difficulty level of triangular chess, we modified it slightly to suit our needs, but enjoyed playing it. It was one of our top favourites when it came to board games. The only problem is that the triangular chess board is not easily available in India; so one needs to ship it from abroad. Hopefully, in a few years, we should be able to manufacture our own sets,” says Harsh.