What is Fairy chess?

I came across the term in the oxford companion to chess (very good reference for terms, openings, and historical players). It did explain what it was but i still do no understand what it means. Also may somebody explain what a fairy problem and fairy mate is. I dont think they have to do with fairy marrige's. 

Thank you

Fairy Chess?!?!? That is a strange name!

fairy chess depends on who is playing

Fairy chess is the generic term for any chess variants which include other pieces than the six different ones we all know about ..

Fairy problems and mate patterns make use of these pieces as well. That said, there are endless ways of how to device such a variant.

thank you for the clarifacation 

Also included are problems with variations on the normal chess rules [like Circe, in which captured pieces 're-birth' on the square at which they start the game].

Not just different pieces. Fairy chess also includes variants with different rules - e.g. Andernach chess (pieces that capture change colours), Circe (pieces that get captured respawn somewhere on the board, location and delay determined by the exact Circe variant), monochromatic (pieces cannot move from light squares to dark, and vice versa), etc.

Fairy chess pieces and variants are usually part of the world of chess problems - they mostly don't make for playable variants.

That is a very debatabe statement. There exist many variants with fairy pieces that are highly playable and very well designed. And then I am not talking about the World's major Chess variants like Xiangqi, Shogi or Makruk. But Gothic Chess, Spartan Chess and most flavors of Chess with Different Armies are examples of variants employing fairy pieces.

For those who would like to test those claims for themselves: the Fairy-Max engine that is packaged with the WinBoard Chess GUI plays many of these variants in addition to orthodox Chess, at a level that should be beatable by a good player. You would just have to select them from the New Variant menu.

Dumbledore'd 'osen Wizard Chess.

Fairy chess is not a clearly defined term; the best definition I can come up is "a chess variant". This involves pretty much everything starting from Chess960 to Capablanca chess to circe chess, but some people will probably disagree with me (mostly regarding Chess960).

You know what chess problems are? Fairy chess problems are just chess problems using some fairy chess rules.

Remellion's statement is correct to some extent, depending on the variants. Some variants are intended to be playable, while others are intended to be strictly theoretical (only to the world of chess problems) where playing it will most likely cause confusion.

I see now... or how... or wha' or wha'ever. 

I concede there are many playable fairy variants. Capablanca chess, and most variants with adding/replacing a fairy piece or allowing promotion to fairy pieces should be playable. Bearing less resemblance to normal chess, bughouse, losing/suicide, and atomic/bomb are common, and Alice, Augsburg and possibly some Circe variants may be playable.

Equally, there are many unplayable "problemist" variants, particularly those in retroproblems - some types of Circe may be lousy, Grid, Einstein, monochromatic and generally anything with a silly or obscure name is probably broken for normal play.

I would not associate Chess variants that use orthodox pieces but differ in other rules from orthodox Chess (such as Crazyhouse, Atomic, Suicide, 3Check, King of the Hill) with 'Fairy Chess'. But that might be personal.

Wikipedia - Fairy Chess

Fairy chess comprises chess problems that differ from classical (also called orthodox) chess problems in that they are notdirect mates. The term was introduced by Henry Tate in 1914 and has resisted change since then. While selfmate dates from the Middle Ages, helpmate was invented by Max Lange in the late 19th century. Thomas Dawson (1889–1951), the "father of fairy chess",^[1] invented many fairy pieces and new conditions. He was also problem editor of Fairy Chess Review(1930–51).

Although the term "fairy chess" is sometimes used for games, it is more usually applied to problems where the board, pieces, or rules are changed to express an idea or theme impossible in orthochess.^[2]

Types of fairy chess problems include:

• New stipulations: Probably the most used alternations are new stipulations instead of a direct mate stipulation. A lot of them were invented and some became established. Selfmates and helpmates are nowadays often considered to be orthodox stipulations. Among others are: reflexmates, various types of seriesmovers or recently very popularhelpselfmates. Part of new stipulations are also retroanalytical problems including shortest proof games and retractors. Finally, various construction tasks on chess and mathematical problems using chess objects are considered to be chess problems as well.
• New chess pieces: Conventional chess pieces are generalized in many ways (grasshopper, nightrider, cannon, etc.). See main article Fairy chess pieces.
• New conditions: Encompassing all changes of rules including rules for captures, checks, checkmates, general movement abilities, etc. Many were invented; some became established: circe chess, Madrasi chess, Andernach chess,monochromatic chess, patrol chess, Einstein chess and numerous others.
• Different boards: One can vary board size from 8×8 to other sizes (10×10, 8×10, unusual board shapes, etc.) or use different geometries: cylinder (vertical and horizontal), anchor ring or torus and others.

All problems in the FIDE Albums are divided into eight sections: directmates (2-movers, 3-movers and moremovers),endgame studies, selfmates, helpmates, fairy chess and retro and mathematical problems.

I dislike the term 'fairy' - I would prefer something like 'variant' or 'unorthodox'. Blame T.R. Dawson - a great composer with an incredible imagination - but also the guy who voted for 'fairy' as well as 'S' being the letter used for a Knight in english notation for chess problems [a grave PR mistake that haunts English problem publications to this day].

Yeah T.R Dawson wrote a book on Fairy Chess Problems I in fact had this years ago but I don't know what happened to it I'm sure I have it in a box somewhere (I never throw a chess book away)

http://www.amazon.com/Classics-Fairy-Thomas-Rayner-Dawson/dp/0486229106/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1419868718&sr=8-1&keywords=fairy+chess+dawson

Got it from a book store near Oxford for $3 in good (not great condition)

Hmm, what would you propose? N? And what would nightrider be? I?

Or probably should have just blamed the first person to call that leaping piece a knight instead of something not beginning with K,Q,R,B,P.

The matter is not entirely without relevance, as I am trying to design a classification of Chess variants, in connection with automatically registering installed engines in GUIs that could use them, on Linux. (On most GUIs this currently requires some user action, where he would have to browse to the engine executable, and give some info about it.) The classification would serve to allow the user to select only automatic registration of engines that play games he is interested in, so that die-hard Chess users would not be annoyed by Xiangqi or Shogi engines, etc.

Of course all the World's major Chess variants would be in classes of their own (chess, xiangqi, shogi). Chess960 also seems deserving of a class of its own, ratherthan being grouped with other variants, as there would be many people interested in just chess + chess960.

For other variants I was thinking to split them up in 'antichess' (losers, suicide, giveaway, with mandatory acpture), 'dropchess' (crazyhouse, bughouse, pocket knight), goalchess (orthodox except for the winning condition, like 3checks, king of the hill, reach last rank, perhaps knightmate), historic (predecessors of western Chess, like shatranj and courier chess, perhaps tamerlane chess) fairychess (participation of non-orthodox pieces, e.g. Capablanca, Seirawan, chess with different armies, team-mate chess), weirdchess (with pretty drastic rule modifications, e.g. atomic, twokings), aseanchess (Thai, Cambodean and Birman Chess). And of course xiangqi, shogi and shogivariants (chu shogi, tori shogi, mini-shogi) for non-western variants.

Fairy chess can be summed up in two different playing styles.

1) Fairy chess is a popular variant of chess where one of the players (usually weaker) does nothing but try to trade everything off the board making for an exceptionally dull game.  This first variant of fairy chess is quite misleading, in that the player (again, usually weaker) is misleaded into thinking their prospects for a win get greater with each piece that is needlessly traded off.  Like fairys, this concept is not real; an old-wives-tale at best.

2) Variant two of fairy chess requires a silent agreement between both players in which one player locks up the pawns simply for the sake of locking up the pawns, and the other one allows it because the pawn locker (often times weaker, and or an idiot) is alluded into believing he can get some unrealistic attack going.  This simply isn't true.  These games usually result in a lot of time burning, and excessive piece re-arrangement.  This variant doesn't so much depend on playing strength, as it depends on sheer cowardness and fairy-like beliefs.

***It should be noted that in both these variants, one player indeed does play like a fairy.***

Nightrider can be NR.

The only reason the Knight was assigned the letter S was to match German and Russian notation. Well, IMO, it's fine that different languages have different letters for notation. The French, for example, use C for the Knight, because in their language, the piece's name is Cavalier.

Note that we chose not to match German or Russian notation on the other pieces: D [Dame] = Queen, T [tower of some sort] = Rook, and L [Laufer] = Bishop and B [Bauern] for Pawn.

I'm used to some decisions about language and semantics being arbitrary and illogical, but this is ridiculous.