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Gross Chess. A big variant with a small learning curve. (12x12, Cells: 144) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
🕸💡📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Mon, Feb 21, 2022 11:25 PM UTC in reply to Jean-Louis Cazaux from Sun Feb 20 12:13 PM:

I have noticed that several games of Gross Chess end up with some Marshalls and/or Archbishops unmoved. Maybe the presence of two Marshalls and two Archbishops is somewhat excessive.

Even if a piece doesn't move, it influences the moves of other pieces by protecting or threatening other spaces on the board. So, not moving these pieces isn't evidence that they are playing no role in the game. This may rather be a sign that because of differences in playing ability, one player is having an easy time defeating another player. In the endgames I can recall from Gross Chess, both players got down to very little material and had to employ whatever pieces they had left.

I wonder if a variant with a single Marshall on g1 and Archbishop on f1 with empty a1, b1, k1, l1 would be worth to be investigated.

One problem with this is that it destroys the symmetry of the setup. Another problem is that it leaves the King, Queen, Bishops and Cannons without any empty spaces to move to behind the Pawn line, and a game with this setup may as well be played on a 10x10 board, since it doesn't make effective use of the greater space provided on a 12x12 board.