Hexagonal chess is a group of chess variants played on boards composed of hexagon . The best known is Gliński's variant, played on a symmetric 91-cell hexagonal board. Since each hexagonal cell not on a board edge has six neighbor cells, there is increased mobility for pieces compared to a standard orthogonal chessboard. (E.g., a rook has six natural directions for movement instead of four.) Three colours are typically used so that no two neighboring cells are the same colour, and a colour-restricted game piece such as the orthodox chess bishop usually comes in sets of three per player in order to maintain the game's balance. Many different shapes and sizes of hexagon-based boards are used by variants. The nature of the game is also affected by the 30° orientation of the board's cells; the board can be horizontally (Wellisch's, de Vasa's, Brusky's) or vertically (Gliński's, Shafran's, McCooey's) oriented. (E.g., when the sides of hexagonal cells face the players, pawns typically have one straightforward move direction. If a variant's gameboard has cell vertices facing the players, pawns typically have two oblique-forward move directions.) The possibility of a hexagon-based board with three-fold rotational symmetry has also resulted in a number of three-player variants. The first applications of chess on hexagonal boards probably occurred mid-19th century, but two early examples did not include checkmate as the winning objective. More chess-like games for hexagon-based boards started appearing regularly at the beginning of the 20th century. Hexagon-celled gameboards have grown in use for strategy games generally; for example, they are popularly used in modern wargaming. Gliński's hexagonal chess Gliński's hexagonal chess, invented by Władysław Gliński in 1936 and first launched in Britain in 1949, is "probably the most widely played of the hexagonal chess games". The game was popular in Eastern Europe, especially in Gliński's native Poland. At one point there were more than half a million players, and more than 130,000 board sets were sold. Gliński's book Rules of Hexagonal Chess was published in 1973. Rules The rules are the same as those of orthodox chess except as follows. The game is played on a vertically oriented regular hexagonal board with sides 6 cells long, which has 91 hex cells having three colours (light, dark, and mid-tone), with the middle cell (or "hex") usually mid-tone. The usual set of chess pieces is increased by one bishop and one pawn. The board has 11