page_title: Courier chess
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Courier chess / History
context_page_description: Courier Chess is a chess variant that was played at earliest in the 12th century and is known to have been played for at least 600 years. It probably played a part in evolving modern chess out of Medieval Chess. The game was subsequently replaced by a more modern form.
context_section_description: Wirnt von Gravenberg, writing early in the thirteenth century, mentioned the Courier Game in his poem Wigalois, and expected his readers to know what he was talking about.  Heinrich von Beringen, about a hundred years later, mentioned the introduction of the couriers as an improvement in chess.  Kunrat von Ammenhausen, still in the first half of the fourteenth century, told how he had once in Constance seen a game with sixteen more men than in the "right chess": each side having a trull, two couriers, a counsellor, and four extra pawns.  He added that he had never seen the game anywhere else, in Provence, France, or Kurwalhen.
  Sometime shortly after 1475 someone put the courier on the standard chessboard in place of the old alfil and gave the queen the combined powers of the courier and the rook.  This game was so much more exciting than medieval chess that it soon drove the older game off the market.  Other improvements were tried out.  One was an optional double first step for the pawns.  This was at first restricted to the king's, queen's, and rooks' pawns, and then gradually extended to the others.
  In the early sixteenth century Lucas van Leyden, in the Netherlands, painted a picture called The Chess Players in which a woman appears to be beating a man at Courier Chess. Gustavus Selenus (Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg) in his 1616 book Das Schach- oder Königs-Spiel, mentioned the Courier Game as one of three forms of chess played in the village of Ströbeck near Halberstadt in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany.  He described it in detail, and gave drawings of the pieces.  The names he gave the pieces do not always match the figures in the drawings: the piece called the Schleich is depicted as a court jester.  In 1651 Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, gave to Ströbeck a playing board with chess on one side and the Courier Game on the other, and a set of silver pieces.  These pieces were lent in the eighteenth century and never returned, but there is a set of wooden pieces.  In 1821 H. G. Albers reported that Courier Chess was still played in Ströbeck, and that some pieces had gained more powerful moves, but a few years later other visitors found that it had been abandoned.  In 1883 the local chess club revived it.  Playing sets based on Lucas van Leyden's painting are commercially available.
caption: The Chess Players by Lucas van Leyden (c. 1520)
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