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All the King's MenAn article on pieces
. Page describing variant chess pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Jul 12, 2008 07:07 AM UTC:
I had never heard of the term 'darter' and the only image it brings to mind is this silly game of throwing arrows. I can't really relate that to Chess pieces. 'Lame leaper' OTOH seems intuitively obvious. The qualification 'lame' is not intended to be a complimnt: it is a clear disadvantage over an ordinary leaper. If that leaper covers a range of 2 or more, that is. Ferz and Wazir cannot suffer, but it would be better to call those 'steppers' than 'leapers' (i.e. the same distinction as between 'sliders' and 'riders'). A Mao is almost exactly worth half a Knight, when you let it participate in a normal Chess game.

Of course the Mao is a worse-than-average example of a lame leaper, as the paths for its moves overlap, so that two moves can be blocked with one piece. The Falcon in multipath, but also suffers from this effect, partly undoing the multipath advantage. 

Perhaps it would be useful to define an 'effective number of paths', as the conductivity of a network of 1-Ohm resistors connecting the squares through which it moves. This would result in 8 for a normal Knight, but would reduce to  2.66 for a Mao, while 8 moves that could be independently blocked on non-intersecting paths would have 4. The calculation for a Falcon would be a complicated problem in cicuit theory, though.