consider a chess variant in which the primary type of movement is knight movement. let it be part of a larger theme of subverting the importance of adjacency in orthodox chess.
obvious pieces to have: knight and nightrider.
knight movement alternates checkerboard colors each move, analogous to wazir. some possibilities for colorbound pieces:
ferz: not so good because adjacency regains importance.
dabbaba: not so good because 4-way colorbound.
alfil: not so good because 8-way colorbound. it does in one move what a knight would take 4 moves to do. maybe this is good. maybe this is bad, because it takes away from the knight movement being fundamental.
camel = (1,3)-leaper: sqrt 10 seems a very long distance.
bishop+alfil-ferz compound: bishop which cannot move to adjacent diagonal square, but can leap over it if occupied, then continue sliding. it is a bishop modified to suit the theme of non-adjacency. previously on subtractive powers. this piece has asymmetric retreat: it cannot always go back the way it came. however, this is deliberate because we are ignoring adjacent squares, and what is adjacent changes depending on where you are.
other potentially useful pieces:
alfil+knight+dabbaba compound: jumps over one ring of adjacent squares to the next ring. this might be a good king.
dabbaba+knight compound: dabbaba modified just enough not be colorbound.
combining knight and dabbaba allows triangulation, useful in endgame.
rook+dabbaba-wazir: rook minus adjacent squares.
"pawn" movement in the theme of knight movement: a radical idea is to rotate the board by arctan(1/2) and have pawns move only one knight move "forward". less radical: pawns move (+-1, 2) and capture (+-2, 1).
many details remain.
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