Friday, August 03, 2018

[qtomlpcn] More color-bound chess

A chess variant in which more pieces are colorbound:

Rook instead moves like a dabbabarider + ferz compound.

Queen = dabbabarider + bishop

Knight = camel, or camel + alfil because camel is pretty weak.

All other pieces remain the same.

If only 1 queen per side, then we want some way for it to be able to change parity (color).  Easiest is to also add a wazir ability.

Maybe being adjacent to a king causes a dabbaba piece to temporarily gain the ability to move like a king, namely gaining the wazir move.

Or, drops like bughouse, shogi, crazyhouse.  This was vaguely inspired by considering a chess board as two separate boards (like bughouse) of different parities which are only weakly interacting.  Pawns, not colorbound, become even more intensely the soul of chess.

Or, start with 2 colorbound queens, one of each color, per side.  Adding one more non-colorbound piece, perhaps orthodox knight or Man, would give 10 pieces for a 10-wide board, and the larger board is nicer anyway for camel.  Or 2 kings per side: capture either, or both?

Move up to two pieces, one per parity, on each turn?  This might counterbalance how the 10x10 board is less dense so leads to fewer fights.  A parity change move (king, pawn, Man) can be accompanied by a second parity change move in the opposite direction.

Or, get rid of queen, replace with Man.  Colorbound queens can appear at pawn promotion, requiring strategy to pick which parity square the pawn promotes on.

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