What is Jeson Mor?

Jeosn Mor is a board strategy game considered to be a variant of Chess. It is based on chess as it includes some of its concepts in the game, however the rules are much simpler and involving fewer components in one match. This game is simpler to play than chess, but can be pretty tricky to play nonetheless.

The rules of the game

Jeson Mor, which for brevity we will refer to as: JM, is played on a 9x9 chessboard. Normally a chessboard is 8x8, but this game adds one more column and one more row. This is done to allow room for one special house on the board located at the very center of it: r5:c5 (row 5 and column 5); this house is special and has a different color than the other ones (usually red), alternatively, it can be shown with an additional border.

The arrangement

Both players arrange a personal army of chess pieces consisting of one single line of knights. Exactly, each player gets 9 knights, though in this game they will be referred to as: horses. Each Horse behaves like a normal Chess Knight "Chess Knight on Wikipedia"), this piece is able to jump and form a "L" shaped movement when moving to a different house.

As it happens in Chess, White starts by moving first, Black follows. Also, it is not possible to pass, it means that every player must actually move a piece during its turn.

Winning

Each player fights against the other one in order to win:

To win, one player must place one of his horses on the central house and then move that same horse out of it. Another way to win is to capture all opponent's horses.

Differently from Chess, there is no King and no checkmate. Horses can capture other horses as per standard Chess rules, however the objective of the game is conquering the center (and leaving it).

As said at the beginning, it is a very easy game, however it gives room to very intriguing strategies to be played, so do not underestimate this uncommon yet intriguing discipline.