Believe it or Not

 Believe it or not, I've actually played this game. The pieces were not this fancy. They were little wooden blocks with pictures drawn on the top of them. The board was a hand colored piece butcher block paper.

A childhood buddy and I had read all of Burroughs' Mars books and so we created a working set to play. It plays a little weird if you know anything about real chess. There's a link below, if you want to learn how to play.

http://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/jetan.html

We are just in time for this:

Jetan

The recent explorations on Mars have not yet uncovered a chess variant that is played on this planet. While it seems unlikely that the Pathfinder will discover such a game, author Edgar Rice Burroughs (well known for his Tarzan books) describes a form of Martian Chess.
Burroughs wrote a series of adventure (science fiction) books that play on the planet Mars. In the fifth of these books, called The Chessmen of Mars, a game is played, and the rules are given. This `Martian Chess' is Jetan, the game whose rules are described below. The game is very playable and entertaining according to Gollon.
The game represents a war between a yellow and a black race of Martians.
Here you see the cover of the book where the game appears. You can also view the cover in more detail (file of size 221K.)


There are two places in Burroughs' book where the rules are given: 1) they are summarized at the very end, 2) they are also presented in the Chapter 2. It seems that very few people paid attention in the past to this chapter 2 which contains some interesting and unique informations.
Jetan has been described in several books and many places on the web. However, the given rules suffer from different interpretation of the somewhat minimalist text from Burroughs. Even worst, some wrong interpretations have been re-taken by other authors with more errors. The rules given hereafter are the results of going back to the original source (that you can check yourself). Play-testing with Zillions software has also been very useful since it has definitively shown that the end-game rules had to be revised.
See also

1. The Rules of Jetan. By Larry Lynn Smith.
2. The Rules of Jetan: link2.dir/jetanrules.html. By Larry Lynn Smith.
3. Tommy's Toys has a shareware program that plays Jetan. (Link.)
4. The complete text of the "Chessmen Of Mars" from E.R.Burroughs .
5. Everything about Barsoom you don't know yet