Abstract: A chess game is provided for play by two, three or four persons played according to the conventional rules of chess as to movement and capturing of pieces, castling, check and checkmate. As in conventional chess, each player possesses an initial force of a king, a queen, two bishops, two knights, two rooks and eight pawns. The game is played on a checkerboard having two hundred eight playing squares arranged in a central playing array of twelve bilaterally arranged rows having twelve squares per row and bordered by four smaller staging arrays, each of the staging arrays having eight bilaterally arranged rows of two squares per row. One of each of the four staging arrays is longitudinally centered on and contiguous with each of the four sides of the central playing array. Two of the four staging arrays have squares of different colors from each other.