Chapayev (, 'game of Chapayev' or 'Chapayev's game') is a

board game A board game is a type of tabletop game that involves small objects () that are placed and moved in particular ways on a specially designed patterned game board, potentially including other components, e.g. dice. The earliest known uses of the ...

, a hybrid of

checkers Checkers (American English), also known as draughts (; English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English), is a group of Abstract strategy game, strategy board games for two players which involve forward movements of uniform game ...

(draughts) and gamepiece-impact games like

carrom Carrom is a tabletop game of Indian origin in which players flick discs, attempting to knock them to the corners of the board. In South Asia, many clubs and cafés hold regular tournaments. Carrom is commonly played by families, including c ...

, novuss, and pichenotte, giving it gameplay aspects in common with both

billiards Cue sports are a wide variety of games of skill played with a cue stick, which is used to strike billiard balls and thereby cause them to move around a cloth-covered table bounded by elastic bumpers known as . Cue sports, a category of stic ...

and

table shuffleboard Table shuffleboard (also known as American shuffleboard, indoor shuffleboard, slingers, shufflepuck, and quoits, sandy table) is a game in which players push metal-and-plastic weighted Puck (sports), pucks (also called ''weights'' or ''quoits' ...

on a smaller scale, as well as some checkers strategy. It is played throughout the territory of the former

USSR The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. The aim is to knock the opponent's pieces off the board. The game is named after the

Russian Civil War The Russian Civil War () was a multi-party civil war in the former Russian Empire sparked by the 1917 overthrowing of the Russian Provisional Government in the October Revolution, as many factions vied to determine Russia's political future. I ...

hero,

Vasily Chapayev Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev (; 5 September 1919) was a Russian soldier and Red Army commander during the Russian Civil War. Biography Chapayev was born into a poor peasant family in a village called , now part of Cheboksary. During World War I ...

Equipment

The game requires a

checkerboard A checkerboard (American English) or chequerboard (British English) is a game board of check (pattern), checkered pattern on which checkers (also known as English draughts) is played. Most commonly, it consists of 64 squares (8×8) of alternating ...

and checkers, eight pieces of each colour. Pieces are of small size (smaller than the squares on the board, or the game may be too easy), and usually made of wood.

Rules

The game is played in several rounds, with two players (or potentially with two teams of players alternating turns or shots during their turn). During the first round, white pieces are placed on the first row, and black on the last. White opens the game. (To neutralize the advantage, the pie rule can be used, allowing the black player to choose to switch places after the first move; this is similar to the in the pocket billiards game

nine-ball Nine-ball (sometimes written 9-ball) is a discipline of the cue sport pool. The game's origins are traceable to the 1920s in the United States. It is played on a rectangular billiard table with at each of the four corners and in the middle o ...

.) A player takes their turn by flicking one of his pieces with the index finger to shoot it at one or more of the opponent's pieces. If the move pushes one or more of the opponent's pieces off the board while all of the shooting player's own pieces remain, the player gets an extra move. When a move fails to dislodge an opponent's piece, or the player dislodges one of the player's own pieces, the opponent's turn to move begins. The game continues until only one colour remains on the board, winning the round. Then the winner starts the next round, with that player's pieces one row further forward. When the seventh round starts, the black and white rows will be next to each other. If a piece is flipped upside-down after an impact, it is called a ''traitor'' and the opponent gets control of it. For the seventh and subsequent rounds, not only does a successful shooter move forward one row, but the loser is forced to move backwards. When one of the players reaches the final row, the opponent has no place left for their pieces and therefore loses the game.

Variations

The rules of Chapayev differ from region to region. In some variations, an allowed move is to put the thumb and index finger on two pieces of one's own colour and quickly move them together towards centre, pushing an opponent's piece toward the middle off of the board – sometimes called a "scissors" move. In another variant, the game is not finished when one player's remaining pieces have retreated to the back row and one of the opponent's pieces has reached that row: The next step is adding a second checker atop the piece of the advancing side (the figure is called a ''horse'' or ''tank''; this is similar to being "crowned" in Western draughts/checkers). The game continues until one player's pieces are all eliminated.

Computer versions

Several variants of Chapayev have been created as

computer simulation Computer simulation is the running of a mathematical model on a computer, the model being designed to represent the behaviour of, or the outcome of, a real-world or physical system. The reliability of some mathematical models can be determin ...

s. Implementations include ''Chapay'' (dating to 1999) at Pyva.net; ''Chapayev 3D'' (') from Narod.ru; ''Shuffle'', ''Shuffle Challenge'', and ''Shuffle Snakebites'' by WildSnake Software and Shockwave.com; the ''Battle Checkers'' and ''Chapayev''

iOS Ios, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

games at Apple's iTunes Store; and ''Chapayev'' for Android on the Google App Market (now Google Play; this game typically requires a checkers board and 8 to 16 Android devices).

References

Chapayev website

Chapayev Game

{{refend Disk-flicking games Russian games Soviet games Russian inventions Soviet inventions Board games

Equipment

Rules

Variations

Computer versions

See also

References