Kriegspiel

Kriegspiel is a chess variant: the normal rules of Chess apply, but players cannot see the opponent's pieces and pawns. This makes Chess more similar to wargames.

There exist several sets of rules, which differ slightly. The most common ruleset is that defined by the Internet Chess Club (wild 16), also used for the ICGA Computer Olympiad

Where to play

You can play Kriegspiel on line with humans on the Internet Chess Club(wild 16) or with a program on the Pathguy site.

Resources

Here we collect a database of Kriegspiel games played on the ICC.

Here we collect some table bases for playing perfectly the related Kriegspiel endgames (KRk - 4MB, KQk - 13MB, KBBk - 54MB, KBNk - 120MB) computed by retrograde analysis for perfect play.

This is an interface to play Kriegspiel on the ICC.

References

I have written a book and some research papers on Kriegspiel.

La Scacchiera Invisibile (work in progress, in Italian, contains Appendix in English on Kriegspiel rules).

A Rational Approach to Kriegspiel (with F.DallaLibera and F.Maran), published in Advances in Computer Chess 8, 1997

Computer Programming of Kriegspiel Endings (with A.Bolognesi), appeared in Advances in Computer Games 10, 2003

Searching over Metapositions in Kriegspiel (with A.Bolognesi), presented at Computer Games 2004 (Israel)

Representing Kriegspiel States with Metapositions (with GP.Favini), presented at 20th IJCAI 2007 (India)

Moving in the Dark: Progress through Uncertainty in Kriegspiel (with A.Bolognesi), presented at Computer Games Workshop, Amsterdam 2007

A Program to Play Kriegspiel (with GP. Favini), published in ICGA Journal, March 2007

Solving Kriegspiel endings with brute force: the case of KR vs. K (with GP. Favini), in Advances in Computer Games 12, Pamplona, Spain, 2009.

Monte Carlo Tree Search Techniques in the Game of Kriegspiel (with GP. Favini), presented at 21st IJCAI 2009 (Pasadena, California).

Progress through uncertainty in some Kriegspiel endings (with A.Bolognesi and GP. Favini), IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games, 2010.

Monte Carlo Tree Search in Kriegspiel (with GP. Favini), Artificial Intelligence Journal, 2010. doi:10.1016/j.artint.2010.04.017

Retrograde analysis of Kriegspiel endgames (with GP. Favini), IEEE Conf. on Computational Intelligence and Games, Copenhagen 2010.

Algorithmic explorations of a well known wargame(with GP. Favini), 6th Meeting on Game Theory, SING, Palermo, 2010.

Playing the perfect Kriegspiel endgame (with GP. Favini), Theoretical Computer Science, 2010.

News

Darkboard is a program able to play Kriegspiel. It won the first Kriegspiel tournament held at the 11th Computer Olympiad in Turin (Italy), in May 2006. These (Game1 Game3 Game4 Game5 Game6 Game7 Game8 Game2 is not available) are the games played, in the notation Kriegspiel PGN

Giampiero Favini and Paolo Ciancarini at the Prize Awarding ceremony in Turin

The Gold medal, recto ; The Gold medal, verso

Darkboard won again the second Kriegspiel tournament held at the 14th Computer Olympiad in Pamplona (Spain), in May 2009