Eight Pawns

August 29, 2026

There is a boredom peculiar to chess: the boredom of symmetrical positions. Open a game, let both sides develop in mirror image for fifteen moves or so, and you may feel that characteristic emptiness settle over the board—as though the game, barely begun, had already returned its verdict. This is not merely the impression of a tired player. It is a widely shared observation, almost a commonplace of chess culture, and it has crystallized into a whole vocabulary for the positions held to be sterile, exhausting, or soporific.

Dead draw: structures so symmetrical and so evenly matched that they kill all practical interest, leading inexorably to a draw while draining the players of their creative energy.
Copycat, or sterile symmetry: mirror openings—certain lines of the Symmetrical English, the Exchange French—are often described as psychological traps. The player believes they are controlling the game by copying their opponent, while the position suffocates of its own accord.
Grandmaster draw, or simply drawish: a structure without a single rough edge, where boredom lies in wait. By extension, such a position is said to lack imbalances—the concept dear to Wilhelm Steinitz and later to Garry Kasparov, according to which one needs friction in order to hope to win.
Drying out, or draining the position of all substance: common expressions for the process by which two players, through symmetrical moves or systematic exchanges, eliminate every tension, leaving the rest of the game mechanical and laborious.
Playing against your own shadow: a poetic image for that sense of futility before an opponent who simply answers with perfect symmetry—the game becomes a sterile duel against a reflection.

There is a remedy: play with different armies, so that the opponent is never again a mere reflection of oneself. The idea is not new. Ralph Betza laid its foundations as early as 1979, under the name Chess with Different Armies, and it has been quietly gaining ground ever since, carried by a community of variant enthusiasts. On PyChess, a player can now write an army of their own—its own pieces, its own powers—and set it against a stranger the same evening.

Behind that promise, however, lies a Gordian knot—a chicken-and-egg problem. For players to take up these unequal armies, the armies must be fair; but for them to be fair, players must play them, in numbers and over time; and to know whether they are fair, players must, again, play them. The fate of Betza's own armies is an almost cruel demonstration. Assessed at the outset on the intuition of human play alone, they had to wait until 2010, then 2015, and test campaigns run by the Fairy-Max engine, for it to emerge that several of them clearly outclassed the FIDE pieces—which turned out, once the evaluation was in, to be the weakest army of the four. Without data in quantity, there is no fine-tuning the value of unfamiliar pieces; and without some plausible balance at the outset, there is no attracting or keeping the community that would produce the data.

But rather than inventing new pieces, new variants and new communities out of nothing, could we not simply bring together on one board games that already exist—Western chess, Japanese shōgi, Chinese xiàngqí? Three traditions descended from a common ancestor, separated for centuries, and never since reunited; each carries within it centuries of adjustment, of tournaments, of theory—a balance already tested, somewhere, by millions of games played without the help of a single engine. The Gordian knot does not disappear, but it changes in kind. It is no longer a matter of inventing a balance out of nothing; it is a matter of bringing into conversation balances that already exist, each on its own side, and that have never had to meet.

In 1749, the French player François-André Danican Philidor wrote that the pawns are the soul of chess. Beyond the purely strategic context of the phrase, we can read in it today an invitation of another order: to reincarnate the Chinese game on a chessboard, provided its pawns are replaced by soldiers. That would no longer be playing against your own shadow—but against an entire civilization.