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Thanks for your comments! Perhaps I should explain something about the
background.

The Lion as described is a key piece in all large Shogi variants, starting
with the 12x12 Chu Shogi. These games have been around since the 12th
century, so one can indeed assume they are highly evolved. The purpose of
the proposed variant was to introduce this piece to players of the FIDE
game. So the piece was a given. One could argue that the possibility to
jump is an unnecessary complication, and that one-or-two King moves per
turn might have been enough, as most distant squares can be reached
multi-path fashion, so the chances of actually being blocked are not that
large. Jumping over the Pawn wall is a quite common opening move in Chu
Shogi, however, so I decided to not simplify the piece.

Chu Shogi also has anti-Lion-trading rules, of which those I phrased here
are a highly simplified version. For 'substitution variants', which are
FIDE augmented with only a single unorthodox piece, there is always the risk
that the players will quickly trade this piece, after which the game is
spoiled as a variant. The more powerful the piece, the larger the risk, and
in the case of the Chu Lion, this risk is enormous. (One centralized Lion
attacks 24 squares, i.e 37.5% of the board, and if both players centralize
their Lion, the Lions will almost always attack each other.)

I don't think 'highly evolved' is a disadvantage per se. The evolution took place for a reason, and if in a new game the same reason would apply, it seems a regression to throw away the advanced features. E.g. it would never occur to me to drop the Pawn double-push and e.p. capture in a Chess-with-Different-Armies sub-variant. These are needed there just as badly as in orthodox Chess, for the same reason, and dropping them would make an awful game.


As to the name: indeed I noticed there was a reference to Lion Chess in the
index of this site. (No rule description, just an applet.) As it didn't
seem to have anything to do with Lions, (it involves just Cannons of various flavors), it
seemed kind of a misnomer, and I thought the proposed variant was more
deserving of this name. It is not unprecedented to have two games with the
same name (e.g. Dragon Chess). I don't like to use 'Chu Shogi' in the
name, to most orthodox Chess players the words Chu and Shogi would not mean
anything. If a name change is desirable, something like 'Mighty-Lion
Chess' would appeal to me more.