Four-player chess for themselves. As with regular chess, four-player chess begins with fortifications and the of pieces, but opportunities for capturing pieces (and gaining points) come about at large as each of the three opponents likewise do attacks and make threats of capture. Therefore picking friends and enemies has a political quality; ultimately the impromptu teammates will have to combat each other as only one can win. The Cox-Forbes theory of the origin of chess, though debunked, asserts that a four-player version was the earliest form of the game. A description of a four-player chess game is found in an Indian text
William Lewis (chess player) treatises, but his isolation prevented him from assimilating the positional ideas of the new generation of chess-players. For this reason, Hooper and Whyld in their Oxford Chess Companion describe the last voluminous work of Lewis, "A Treatise on Chess" (1844), as already "out of date when published". William Lewis (chess player) William Lewis (1787–1870) was an English chess player and author, nowadays best known for the Lewis Countergambit and for being the first player ever to be described as a Grandmaster of the game. Born in Birmingham, William Lewis moved as a young man to London where he worked for