An Enochian army is nine units: a King, four major pieces in the order of Rook, Bishop, Queen, and Knight, and four pawns. Four armies make thirty-six units on one eight-by-eight board. The four Kings sit at the corners, Earth at a1, Air at a8, Water at h8, Fire at h1, and each of them begins doubled on his throne, sharing that single corner square with one of his own major pieces. Two units, one square, from the first move of the game.
The setting chooses the partner
Which major piece stands with the King is not left to the players. It is set by the opening array, called the setting. There are eight settings, each named for an element, in two groups of four: one group is used on the Fire and Earth boards, the other on the Air and Water boards. A setting does two jobs. It fixes the order in which the majors are laid out along the army's edge, and it names the throne partner, the piece that shares the corner with the King. Choose a different setting and you get a different army with the same pieces, which is why experienced players think of the settings as eight openings rather than eight decorations. There is a full walk-through in the settings.
The pawn that belongs to the partner
The doubling has an immediate knock-on effect that new players miss. Every Enochian pawn belongs to one of the major pieces: it stands in front of that piece and promotes into it. The pawn in front of the throne belongs to the throne partner, never to the King. There is no King's pawn in Enochian chess, because a King is not a piece a pawn can become. So the throne partner quietly owns two things at once, its own body on the board and a pawn out in front of it whose entire destiny is to become a second copy of it. Pick a Queen as your throne partner and the throne pawn is a Queen in waiting. Pick a Rook and it is a Rook. See the pawns.
Throne promotion, much later
The throne partner comes back in the endgame through a rule that sounds arbitrary until you know where it comes from. Normally a promoting pawn becomes the piece it belongs to. But a pawn that promotes while standing on a corner square becomes the piece that shared the King's throne in that game's setting instead. The corner remembers who sat there. A pawn that arrives on a throne, any throne, takes the shape of the throne partner rather than its own owner. It is a small rule with real consequences, because it means the setting you chose at the start is still deciding what your pieces turn into forty moves later. Promotion has two other Enochian quirks worth knowing, covered in delayed promotion and the privileged pawn.
Why the corner is worth so much
Thrones matter in Enochian chess in a way corners never do in ordinary chess, and the doubling is the first hint of it. A corner is where an army's command lives. A living King who marches all the way to his ally's throne, the corner diagonally opposite his own, takes command of that army, and if that army had been frozen by an earlier King capture, reaching the throne wakes it up. So the four corners are not just starting squares to be vacated and forgotten. They are objectives. Read throne seizure for the mechanic and frozen armies for what it revives.
Reading a doubled throne at setup
When you sit down, look at all four corners before your first move. Each one tells you three things: which piece that army will promote to on a corner, which piece owns the throne pawn, and which piece has to step aside before the King can move off his square. That last one is a practical timing question in the opening. Two units on one square means the King's first move and the partner's first move are entangled, and an army that leaves the corner clumsily can spend two or three tempi getting untangled while its neighbors develop. For the full setup procedure see how to set up Enochian chess, and for the King himself, the King.
Set a board and look at the corners
The doubled throne is the first strange thing you see and the last thing that stops mattering. Open a free game and check what your setting gave you.
Play NowKeep reading
Follow the corner through the game with throne seizure, learn the eight arrays in the settings, or place the pieces yourself with how to set up Enochian chess.