The idea
Most chess variants adjust a rule or two. This one throws away the symmetry entirely. White has a single piece — the Maharajah — and Black has an ordinary chess army, the Sepoys. That is the whole variant.
It is much older than it looks, and rather better balanced than it sounds.
Setting up
- Black takes the standard sixteen pieces in the standard starting position.
- White has one piece only, the Maharajah, placed on e1.
- White moves first.
How the Maharajah moves
The Maharajah is an amazon: on any turn it may move either as a queen or as a knight. That single piece therefore covers ranks, files, diagonals and the knight's leap — which is why one piece can hold off an army for a surprisingly long time.
It is also royal. It can be given check, and it can be checkmated. In practice this is the constraint that decides the game: the Maharajah cannot trade itself for material, and it cannot capture anything that is defended.
Winning
White wins by
Checkmating the Black king, exactly as in ordinary chess.
Black wins by
Checkmating the Maharajah. Since it is the only White piece, trapping it ends the game.
The one extra rule
Black's pawns may not promote. Without this restriction Black simply walks a pawn down the board, makes a second queen and mates trivially; the restriction is what makes the position worth playing at all. Otherwise Black follows normal chess rules.
Is it fair?
No — and that is well established. On the 8×8 board the game is solved: with perfect play Black always wins. The Sepoys' method is to advance in a connected phalanx so that every piece is defended, giving the Maharajah nothing it can safely take, and then squeeze.
Against imperfect play it is a different story. A single loose piece, a rank left unguarded, and the Maharajah is behind the lines forking two pieces at a time. The practical results are far closer than the theory suggests, which is most of the appeal.
Where it comes from
The variant descends from sarvatobhadra — Sanskrit, roughly "auspicious on all sides" — described in the twelfth-century Mānasollāsa. It resurfaced in the 1871 Kridakaushalya, and reached Western readers in 1892 when Edward Falkener wrote it up under the name it now carries.
The English name is a nineteenth-century framing, and worth reading as such: "sepoy" was the British term for an Indian infantryman in colonial service. The game itself long predates that vocabulary.
Notes for a first game
- Playing the Maharajah: stay out of the centre early. Provoke pawn moves and wait for a defender to step away from something.
- Playing the Sepoys: move as a wall. Never advance a piece your neighbours cannot see. Boredom is a winning strategy here.
- A game usually takes twenty minutes and is quite hard to draw.