Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I had figured I'd comment no further on this subject.... but, I can't
resist on a few points.

Joe stated:  '...And 10x10, or 20x20, is not 'large' - for
square, even-numbered boards, 8x8 is about the smallest size that gives a
decent game -'
Response: Board size is relative.  Most chess players would consider a 10
x 10 variant (100 squares vs 64) to be large.  20 x 20 also is large,
relative to an 8x8 board (which appears to be the 'standard' of measure
since we are talking about chess variants.

Joe continues: '.... clearly 2x2 and 4x4 are useless,'
Response: I'll not argue that.

Joe continues, ' and 6x6 is 'the easy game for the ladies and children'

Response: Ouch!  If the Polgar sisters could hear that, and Maria Ivanka
(9 times Hungarian Woman's Champion.  And if the young child prodigies
could see that statement...' So, I disaprove of that statement.  Many
women and children do quite well, very well, on the 8x8 board.  I am
confident that gender and age do not limit ones performance to certain
small games.

Joe continued: For odd numbered boards, 5x5 is useless, and 7x7 is Navia
Dratp.
Response: Navia Dratp makes use of a 7x7 battlefield.  But there is a 1 x
7 Keep behind the north and south edge... as well as a 'graveyard' and 2
economic crystal-regions per side.  So a mere 7x7 board is a little
misleading.

Joe also writes: 'Please, define your terms. ;-)'
Response: I mainly wanted to defend the honor of ladies and children in
this comment, following the 6x6 remark.  I have no terms to define.  Best
regards to all.

Hi, Gary! You always take me so seriously. :-) 
 1 You've defined 'large, medium and small' in reference to FIDE. Okay,
then I stand by my initial statement. ;-)
 2 On women, children, and early computers: When I did a bit of research
on 6x6 a while back, as well as Los Alamos Chess, I ran into variants from
the 1800's that were specifically designed as easy chess for the ladies
and (precocious?) children. First, I will say, for the record, I am a New
York liberal, living smack dab in the middle of the NY metro area, on the
east bank of the Hudson River. Then I will (gently) point out that the
line you object to was sarcastic, and that NY liberals (even if they are
only fake liberals and don't really mean it) are not likely to seriously
espouse such a position. Second, after the 2 extremely bitter and
hard-fought draws I've played against zcherryz, if you think I'd
seriously maintain men are innately better than women at chess, you're
crazier than I am. And as far as kids, I'm 58. I have a 32 year-old son
and a daughter who will be 25 in 25 days, and comes off our car insurance!
As far as I'm concerned, probably most of the people on this site are
kids. And I can tell ya, I'm certainly not beating them all. :-)
On the serious side, we do have a few points of agreement, in that we both
apparently feel (from what you said) that 8x8 is actually the smallest
decent size for a game. [Before the winners of the 44, 43, 42... square
contests kill me en masse, let me admit to a number of awesome small
exceptions discussed some other time.] And we can agree to call 10x10 and
20x20 'large'. But I still maintain that a large board gives much
greater scope for elegant simplicity. Too many pieces can muddy the theme;
you might as well play a wargame. [I design those, too.]
As always, these discussions with you get me thinking. Enjoy! Joe

Joe, when you tell a joke, remember to keep the humor density above 50%,
otherwise you have a JV (Joke Variant) which is hard to laugh at and can
offend.  Of course, when this happens the JV inventor usually comes back
and says something like, 'Wake up, I was joking.'  Or, 'You took me
seriously?'

So, how are we to know that the GO comparison to large CVs is not a joke? 
In fact, that is more humorus to me than is the ladies/kid comment.

As for your statement:  '... after the 2 extremely bitter and
hard-fought draws I've played against zcherryz, if you think I'd
seriously maintain men are innately better than women at chess, you're
crazier than I am.'
Response: I think you implied that particular conclusion with your
computer, kids, ladies 6x6 statement.  Interesting that your Zcherryz draw
is only mentioned after-the-fact.

Okay, Gary, I stand chastened. 'Scum of the Earth reporting for
barnacle-scraping duty.' I meant no offense in relating what most 19th
century men thought about the general abilities and capacities of women
and children, conveyed in the form of a game deliberately dumbed down to
allow for their 'innate inferiority'. And I included computers in that
disadvantaged group with Los Alamos chess - a 6x6 game dumbed down for the
early computers. I was implicitly contrasting statements from the past with
what we know now. I don't think I could beat today's computers, either.
You wouldn't need a Deep Blue to beat me, a shallow HAL would be more
than adequate. ;-)
Your note made my morning. I'll try to be better, but I'm not a serious
person, so I may slip. I am, however, a serious designer - you know I'd
love to design games professionally, but it's a killer field to break
into with no computer skills. So I enjoy what I do and maybe some day,
I'll get lucky. In the meantime, I have a deep interest in the theory and
practice of game design. And this topic of big board CV's, while I
undoubtedly will never make a penny selling chess variants, is something I
find extremely interesting and very useful. You've seen a couple of my
non-chess games, Spaceships and 4War. I see very strong connections
between them and chess, on more than one level. 4War grew out of
Hyperchess. And I'm just starting to explore a Spaceships chess variant.
So I don't see a sharp line between 'genres'. They cross-pollinate. 
I'm very interested in this topic, but I'd like to see a number of
approaches to big board variants. For example, I oppose adding pieces
because there's more room on the board. (This is undoubtedly a minority
position, however. So I'm working to get the viewpoint adequately
represented and examined.) And I oppose having a large number of different
pieces because you've got all these pieces you just added because you had
more room and now you're trying to figure out what to do with them. This
affects playability in many ways. And I think playability is the first
consideration of game design. Not the only, but the first. Enjoy. Joe

GO CHESS

Was well into the second mile of my walk, just past the local police and
fire stations, when my comment to Gary about Go being just a ferz and
wazir movement away from chess ran through my head, bringing the following
train of thought. Play a game of Go. As you put your stones down, mark them
with either an 'X' for ferz or a '+' for wazir. A stone gets an X if it
is not connected to any friendly stones when it is placed. It gets a + if
it is connected to one or more friendly stones. Captured pieces lose their
markings. When the Go game is over, the captured stones are used to fill
territory, the Go score is calculated, and the captured stones are removed
from the board. Then the chess game starts. White moves one piece either
along a line to the next intersection, W, or diagonally across a square to

the opposite corner intersection, F. Last person with pieces wins the
chess game, and scores one point per piece left. The total score is
figured as the sum of the two. Still not chess, but getting there. Okay,
no king? Make all the pieces pretenders. The last one left on a side gets
promoted to king, with a king's W+F move. Still not chess? Drop the Go
scoring. Play Go only for chesspiece placement, using all the rules of
placement, capture, and when the game ends; but no score. More pieces?
Allow a friendly piece to move onto and combine with another friendly
piece. The N is a W-then-F mover, for example. Combos of Fs could build
alfils, elephants, and bishops. Combos of Ws are dabbabahs and rooks. You
could even set aside a certain number of moves at the beginning of the
movement portion of the game to be used only for combining moves. You
might even restrict all combining moves to this part of the game. You
could have to make a single king, also. Now, you place your piece atoms
and fight to destroy your opponents atoms in the placement stage, build
your complex pieces in the combo stage, then play chess in the movement
stage. This is Go morphed into chess, but where did it cross the line?

I do believe Joe is on the right track now regarding GO and Chess Variants.
 Changing GO pieces to Wazirs and Ferz would make it a Chess and GO Variant
at the same time.  But that is not a game for me.

GO has been played as it is for about 4000 years, and I still enjoy
playing GO by its intended ancient rules.  To get Chess, I simply play
'Chess.'  But Go variants are out there.  Games like Pente, Go-Moku,
Orthello, etc.  There is certainly room for Joe's new GO-Variant idea.

I like your idea, Joe.

There is another variant somewhat germane to this discussion, and that is
'Diffusion Chess' by the brilliant and highly creative Alexandre Muñiz
famous in part for the invention of the Windmill piece. Someone should
definitely create a GO Board for the Game Courier preset so we can try
out some of these nifty chess-go variants. 

http://www.chessvariants.org/32turn.dir/diffusionchess.html

Go Chess; hard to think of many outside of Vulcans or mentats, or somesuch,
who would actually play this game. It has every feature/suffers from every
flaw of big CVs. If done right, it may even add a new sin to the big CV
list. *It's extremely logical. You're in control. You can build every
piece and board position step by step yourself. *It's excruciatingly
slow. You have to build every piece and board position step by step. It'd
take Deep Blue to have even a chance at 'mentally' organizing the chaos
on the board to plan even a little ahead. HAL wouldn't have a chance. ;-)
*You will have a large number of pieces and types of pieces to contest
with, making for rich tactical opportunities and strategic play. *You will
have to wade thru legions of the opponent's pieces before you even get
close to the king. This last contrast has a direct bearing on any large
CV. There is always the temptation to load up the board with pieces; they
look so empty with 100 - 200 empty squares and 30 - 50 pieces. But you can
cut to the chase fairly quickly; you don't have to exchange your first two
rows of pieces with your opponents before you can get down to serious
maneuvering. Being up a queen in Grand Chess is far more meaningful than
being ahead 7 - 6 in queens in '8 of everything' chess. 
But not all big games have to feature goodly numbers of power pieces. Try
a big game with pieces that only move 4-5 squares at most; see what
that's like. Different piece strengths give different game flavors. Most
large games have pieces that move across the board, knights, and the
king/man piece(s). That's so one-sided. 
How many pieces is too many? Most would say it's a matter of taste, but I
think measuring piece numbers against playability will at least give use a
useable product, which is a consideration. I think it's a sin to put
pieces on a board just to fill in spaces. Either get rid of the spaces or
find a more creative use for them. David Paulowich has used the first
method, of getting rid of spaces, and creates tight, intense games on 8x8
boards. I've attempted the second, with some unusual board design, but so
far met with less success. Doesn't mean I'm wrong, just means I have to
try harder.
Now, with all that being said, I kinda like GoChess. Anyone interested in
discussing rules attempting idea playtesting? A 9x9 to 13x13 would be a
decent size to try things out. Done right, it could be almost choked with
pieces of widely varying powers in semi-random starting positions. So
I've got nothing (other than what's in the first paragraph;) against
large games with all the trappings. I'll offer all my opponents in this
debate a new big CV, goChess, to atone for my heresies. Except you, Gary.
:-) For you, I got another game, Lemurian Shatranj, featuring some new
moderate-range pieces, because you already said goChess is not your style.
I promise you'll find Lemurian Shatranj intriguing, buddy. :-) Enjoy   Joe

Joe: I do not mind play testing your GoChess on a 9x9 board.  My statement
regarding that this type of game was not for me was in reference to a 19 x
19 standard Go Board with future Wazirs and Ferzs dropped onto the board...
to play test such a game on a 9 x 9 grid is fine with me... However, should
there be others who want to play test the game,by all means give them
preference over me. I wish you well with this game.

Gary, I'd be very happy to have you and anyone else who wishes playtest
this baby bear. Thanks. Joe

For those who wished for a Go preset to try Chess variants on, here it is
(19x19): 

http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MPgo

Let me know what other features you would like, 9x9 board? 

The piece set I am using was created by Larry L. Smith for his 3-d ZRF's
and only has the standard chess set. If anyone wishes to have other
pieces, perhaps they could create some (they are very small and easy to
modify).

I went ahead an added a 9x9 board.

Tony, just saw the Go preset in 'What's new'. Thank you. Joe

The discussion on board sizes in the Infinite Chess comments is very
interesting for what it does not have, in spite of several versions of
'infinite' chess and the efforts of George Jelliss and Ralph Betza.
There is nothing that approaches infinite, although Ralph Betza's
'chessboard of chessboards' [64 8x8 chessboards arranged in an 8x8
array] with its 512-square sides and over a quarter million squares does
give you a little area to play in. But all the 'infinite' boards have
limitations on how far away from other pieces any piece can move [making
Mr. Betza's behemoth the largest actual board discussed]. They have
flexible boundaries that can stretch and extend in any direction, but all
the games have a finite number of pieces, so there is a maximum area the
pieces can occupy if they are required to be within a specified distance
of other pieces. Even if the requirement is merely being within some
distance of one other friendly or enemy piece, and the pair of pieces go
racing out across the 2D plain, 2 pieces don't take up a lot of room. And
the rules tend to be written so that isolated pair cannot happen. The
average size of these boards is probably under 20x20. Even with more
pieces, the size probably wouldn't get much above 30x30, the total board
area being near 1000 squares. This is wargame size. A chess board is
generally about 100 squares in area (~30-300), and a wargame, about 1000
(~300-3000), very roughly. While there are some exceptions, this is
accurate. Just not precise. Apparently, 'infinite' for chess variants
means 'as big as a wargame.'

i really like bug board cv's and am actually building one that is based
off  hawaian chess and mideast chess and centennial chess

Hey, Andy, your question in our game about 10x10s prompted me to do 2
'kitchen sink'-type large game presets, a 10x10 and a 12x12. Because I
had an overstock of shortrange pieces, most of them my own, I used them in
the presets. Jeremy Good and I are pushing pieces in both. Should you be
interested in taking a look, here are the URLs:
http://play.chessvariants.org/pbm/play.php?game=Lemurian+Great+Shatranj&log=joejoyce-judgmentality-2007-52-159
http://play.chessvariants.org/pbm/play.php?game=Lemurian+Greater+Shatranj&log=joejoyce-judgmentality-2007-53-827
The non-standard pieces are described in 'Two Large Shatranj Variants'
and 'Lemurian Shatranj'. On the 12x12, I tried to create a smallish,
balanced, very powerful shortrange army. Each rank back increases in
power. While the 10x10 has decently strong pieces, its unusual feature is
the different pairings of pieces. There are 8 pairs of identical pieces,
and those 16 pieces, along with the remaining 4, also form 6 families of
similar pieces. These include 4 pairs of colorbound pieces which form 2
families. I'm trying to break a few stereotypes with these games.
Probably just proving I'm crazy instead.

Large boards are certainly difficult to work on successfully; with all that
scope, you have much more room for error. And you also run into a problem
of scaling vs. playability. Any sorts of simplistic extrapolations to
large size will run into a host of problems, many of which translate to
tedium. A certain creativity is called for, a walk off the beaten path.
That walk may often end tangled in brambles or floundering in a sinkhole,
but sometimes it will lead to places you only thought you'd see in your
dreams. I've seen some of David Paulowich's ideas. I think he'll come
out with a game that meets his high standards and is in keeping with his
design philosophy. I'll wish him luck, but I doubt he'll need it. I
will, looking seriously at superlarge variants, games in the 20x20 to
30x30 range, just above my posted games range of 8x8 to 19x19. Got some
practice, and think there are some guides to successful [2D] supergames. 
Moving multiple pieces per turn should speed the game up.
Don't get carried away with pieces or piece types. Too many of either
makes the game unplayable. Strict scaling to a 600 square board would give
each side 150 pieces, which is probably ridiculous. Around 50 pieces is
probably a good number as a general rule; this seems manageable.
Balance the pieces to the size of the game. Using standard FIDE pieces and
piece ratios is probably a bad idea. 'Eight of Everything' chess would
fit nicely on a 24x24 board:
PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP
RNBBNRRNBBNRRNBBNRRNBBNR
xxxxQQQQKKKKKKKKQQQQxxxx
All FIDE rules are in effect except:
1 castling, as the Ks and Rs are not aligned for it;
2 victory, which has new  conditions, primarily by capturing all your
opponents kings before you lose all yours;
3 movement, because you must move a different piece for each king you have
remaining on the board each turn, or you lose.
It's even got 64 pieces, fitting nicely with our general principle. But I
don't think it would play very well. It violates too many other principles
to be a realy good game. Enough for now, more later.

One of the nice things about this site is that you can get so many
different opinions. Sometimes I like a good design challenge, and the
superlarge game poses such challenges. To make it more interesting, I want
to use the FIDE unlimited sliders in the game, because they are 'too
powerful', and I want to design a new composite/compound/whatever piece
to be used in the game, too. [I can also juggle a little.] Oh, and the
game should be reasonably easy to learn and play, and not take too long.
There! Have I left anything out?
Okay, now just how will this be done? Anybody got any ideas? ... Figured
I'd start with Chieftain Chess, a successful [can be played without much
difficulty] 12x16 variant. Notice I'm defining 'success' very broadly;
maybe not broadly enough. Ultima/Baroque is an awesome game that it's
designer says is not playable without difficulty. As a game, it's not
necessarily successful; as a design, it is wildly successful, spawning
several excellent variants of its own. I'll be happy to get a game
that's playable, and I'm willing to leave that decision to others.
What are the characteristics of Chieftain that make it a viable game?
It's somewhat unusual for a chess variant. It's a multi-mover; each side
getting 4 moves per turn, to start. It does not have a single royal piece,
a king. Instead, it uses 4 semi-royal pieces, chiefs, all of which must be
captured to win. It uses command control [pieces are required to be
'activated' by a leader to move]. It has a low starting piece density:
33%. It only uses 5 different pieces. There are no pawns and no promotions
in this game. I think only the last feature has nothing to do with why the
game works. I also believe that every other feature listed is all but a
requirement for a successful superlarge game.

Is it legitimate to use Chieftain Chess as a springboard to superlarge
games? Let's look at some numbers. My superlarge testbed is 24x24, for
576 squares. FIDE is 8x8 for 64 squares. CC is 12x16, for 192 squares,
exactly 1/3 the size of the superlarge and 3 times the size of the
standard, a perfect halfway point. While this guarantees nothing, it is a
good sign. Our only concerns now are that there is some kind of
discontinuity between large and superlarge that invalidates the
extrapolations, or that I just screw up doing the extrapolations, and get
bad results. I consider the second more likely. 
Pieces: FIDE/CC = 16/32 so triple the size, double the piece count...
gives us 64 pieces as a reasonable number. This is a bit higher than our
goal of around 50 pieces per side, and a bit lower than I expect the final
tally for the game I'm looking at. I figure around 100 or so per side.
[Background info: This game has been in concept for a while. It's a
large/superlarge variant of Gary Gifford's 6 Fortresses. Hi, Gary!
Remember what happened with our argument on Go and Chess? Now I got myself
in the same situation with Mats about large boards and compound pieces.
Glad you got me thinking about a very large version of 6F a while back -
thanks!] 
Types of pieces: FIDE/CC = 6/5 This, I believe, is one of those tricky
extrapolations - at least, I hope it is, because I plan to seriously bend
if not break this one in my test game. I certainly don't expect to have
only 4 different piece types in an example superlarge chess variant. In
fact, I am going to try to cheat, and introduce a range of pieces, by
adding not just some more pieces, but classes of pieces. The correct
extrapolation here is to *not* have a large number of different piece
types that are difficult to keep track of; one could comfortably keep
track of maybe 10 different kinds of pieces. To add the variety of pieces
a superlarge should have [otherwise, why bother?], we'll have to find a
workaround.

My thanks to M. Winther for starting this thread back on [2006-04-22].

My chessvariant activities take me farther and farther away from the FIDE piece set. I have a few general ideas on using Shatranj strength pieces on a 16x16 board, with stalemate counting as a victory. Perhaps 30 to 48 pieces on each side, arranged in two 'ISLAND KINGDOMS' surrounded by empty squares. See Chess on a 12 by 12 board for a similar (but smaller) setup.

[Hey, David. Looking forward to seeing your designs at larger sizes.
Apparently we have some agreement on pieces.]
How do you get enough piece variety in a superlarge to make the game
worthwhile without overloading the player with reams of rules? One way is
to establish some basic piece types and modify each of them with a few
different movement rules. To make this work, you must have a good, clear,
simple, easily understandable symbology to go along with your good, clear,
simple, easily understandable and short [for playability] rules. So we
start by using David Howe's Alfaerie icons, something that is most likely
very familiar to anyone who plays variants and would be reading this, and
if not, the info is easily accessible. They are clear, simple, easily
distinguishable, and easily modifiable, all great virtues for any game
designer. Then we add a few simple symbols to the mix, that modify the
piece moves.
What sorts of pieces will we have? Let's look at '8 of Everything'
[which actually has 8 of each FIDE piece, but 24 pawns per side] for some
ideas. It's got 8 kings and 24 pawns, 32 pieces that move 1 square/turn.
It's got 8 knights, which move 2 squares/turn. It's got 24 bishops,
rooks, and queens, which as unlimited sliders, move up to 23 squares/turn.
That's it. Now, admittedly, the bishops, rooks, and queens can move any
number of squares up to their maximum, but there does seem to be a gaping
hole in movement ranges between 1, 2, and 23. We want some
intermediate-range pieces [well, I do, anyhow] to justify blowing the FIDE
board up to 9 times its proper size. And a decent piece mix; Bs, Rs and Qs
are all right in their place, but with all that space, we want a decent
amount of shorter-range pieces, including some cut-down FIDES and some
shortrange point and area covering pieces. 
Finally, we want a few kinds of leaders. Top dog is the king, but we will
also use other leader pieces. Every leader will be allowed to move 1 piece
under its command and within its [limited] command range every turn. This
should take care of little problems like how we work multi-move turns and
how to tame queens that can move 23 squares/turn.

I am thinking of lines of 12 Pawns (or 10 Pawns flanked by a Ferz on each end) on the 5th and 12th ranks on a 16x16 board. Could be as little as two lines of ten pieces each on ranks 3 and 4 (also 13 and 14). That results in 32 pieces per side and 75 percent empty squares. Perhaps Pawns could promote on ranks 3 and 14. Time to crunch some numbers ... first some 8x8 board values:

Pawn=100, Ferz=170, Silver General=280, Commoner=400

(FA)=250, (WD)=275, Knight=300, Free Padwar=320, Lion(HFD)=525

Cannon=250, Bishop=300, Rook=500, Archbishop(BN)=700, Queen=900.

Now I am going to adjust these values for 16x16 by using multipliers scaled by the square root of two (16/8). Observe:

[0.707] Pawn=75(?), Ferz=120, Silver General=200, Commoner=275

[1.000] (FA)=250, (WD)=275, Knight=300, Free Padwar=320, Lion(HFD)=525

[1.414] Cannon=350, Bishop=425, Rook=700, Archbishop(BN)=1000, Queen=1250.

Hello, David. Like your numbers and basic concept for piece numbers and
placement. Following is the URL for my testbed 24x24:
http://play.chessvariants.org/pbm/play.php?game%3DFortress+Chess%26settings%3Dfortresschess1
The setup is basically just weak pieces so far [still need several icons
made for this], and sketches in the general outlines of the force sizes
and dispositions. Currently I plan to put small, powerful forces in the
corner forts, weak and medium-strength pieces in the corps flanking each
army, maybe add a few pieces immediately behind the army on the board,
keeping them short and medium range pieces, and put the high king, his
marshall, guards, and the elite troops and reserve behind the steward
wall. This setup minimizes the initial effects of unlimited sliders, and
will have about 80-100 pieces/side, of which about 25-30 or so pieces will
be 'fortress' pieces, ie: formations of wazirs and stewards, and their
leaders. I will also add an alternate frontline setup, with only one
flanking corps per side, on opposite flanks. Finally, the formations of
wazirs and stewards are the forerunners of a new type of 'piece',
consisting of several mostly shortrange pieces and a leader unit specific
to them that they must be in 'contact' with to move. These would be
'Autonomous Multiple Pieces', or AMPs. While the 2 examples I've
discussed so far are simple and slow, if these amps evolve a bit [a 3rd
piece would be 6 forward-only ferzes and their leader - to make it a
better attack piece, up the number of its components allowed to move each
turn], their natural habitat would likely be on boards of side 30-50. I
see them evolving specific organs [pieces] for attack, defense, and
movement. But they are for later, larger games. I'd call those variants
'Amoeba Chess', but that name is taken by a game [by Jim Aikin; preset
by A. Sibahi] that has a board that changes shape slowly, so maybe I'll
go with something like 'Puddle Chess', where 2 groups of 1-celled
critters fight it out for control of a splash of water on a city sidewalk.
First, however, I have to finish this 'proof-of-concept' 24x24 game.
[Anybody taking bets on how the game comes out? I got a couple bucks to
put down... ;-) ]

CHECKING THE 'Exclude Pieces not in Setup:' BOX will spare my 56K modem the task of loading around 1200 piece GIFs. I have not been following your recent Big Games because of this loading problem, also Windows 98 has bottlenecks associated with holding that many pictures in RAM. My 1280x1024 screen can display all of a 24x16 board, so this is where I would:

remove the groups of pieces in the lower left [a1-e5] and upper right [t20-x24] corners,

go for a GIANT Burmese Chess (Mir Chess 32) setup by pulling the a-f file pieces down 3 ranks and pushing the s-x file pieces up 3 ranks,

remove the now-empty ranks 1-4 and 21-24 to get a GIANT Courier Chess board. Perhaps bring the center groups closer together (gap of 6 ranks instead of 8).

Well, you should have been expecting a weird response! By the way, my previous post wimps out on the crucial subject of medium range pieces: the Half-Rose can advance (3,3) or (4,0) or (6,0) along its twisted journey.