Larger chessboard

The chess board can be extended to arbitrary size straightforwardly. Ranks can be added in the middle. What happens if ranks are subtracted? How goes 4x8 chess? Files may be added beyond the rooks. However to preserve the corner feel of the a and h files, a thin barrier, two ranks tall, is erected beyond the rook and rook pawn. Only the knight may move through the barrier, thus extricating the rook still requires effort. There is a new opening move Ni2 and its mirror. The barrier is two ranks tall instead of one to prevent an additional diagonal attack on a1.

However, there are good reasons for not altering the size of the chess board. The regular size is balanced between large enough to allow for locality and applying lessons learned from similar positions from previous games, and small enough that any move can have effects across the board. Incidentally, these allow the construction of cool chess problems.