Saturday, February 21, 2015

[xclwdqbq] Dabbabarider

The dabbaba rider is an elegant fairy chess piece when playing on checkerboard, unlike the alfil rider or nightrider.  The alternating square colors help easily distinguish where it can go and what it can jump over (but not where it can ultimately get to in a tour, due to its 4 way parity).

Add it to this list, so augmenting the number of possible Dabbaba abilities to 3 instead of 2: none, single jump, rider.  New total: 108 possibilities.

The dabbabarider bishop compound is nice, perhaps the most powerful colorbound piece (until we get to variations of fat pieces like the colorbound gryphon and crooked bishop).

We could also have a weaker dabbaba jumping ability in which it can only jump over empty squares, so equivalently a colorbound rook.

Orthogonal movement abilities, probably a lattice:
wazir < wazir rider (rook)
weak dabbaba < weak dabbaba rider
strong dabbaba < strong dabbaba rider
weak dabbaba < strong dabbaba
weak dabbaba rider < strong dabbaba rider
weak dabbaba rider < wazir rider

Exercise to count the possibilities. Somewhere between 9 and 64. Looks like 1 null, 6 noncompounds, 7 double compounds, and 1 triple compound (Wazir + Strong Dabbaba + Weak Dabbaba Rider) for a total of 15. The only colorbound compound is Strong Dabbaba + Weak Dabbaba Rider. Total piece possibilities is 180.

The strong dabbaba rider can capture on its first move if initial position is behind just one row of pawns.

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