Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Well, 14 knights is indeed a powerful army, but takes time to make it.
The other player may develop is own pieces in comfortable positions. But
that's the spirit of abchess, see the position and reshape your own army
accordingly.

This game is very interesting.  It does look like the knight is a heck of a
value at only 2 stones.  I would make 14 Knights and a Rook.  I bet that
would be hard to deal with!

That's a good idea. But it probably would mean that both players would try
to keep their queens near an adjacent piece, so they can create a new King
while demoting the previous King (if attacked) to a queen and escape the
attack. And this tactic could continue in a cycle.

Usually, I don't like this type of thing (ie, multiple Kings, demoting
royal pieces, ...).

First, I want to thank you for the ZRF! Btw, L. Lynn Smith also made
another ZRF of Abstract Chess :) I'm happy to see that many of you like
this idea.

About the 7+ stacks, I didn't think of them as valid stacks, but I
didn't say anything against either. Indeed there are tactical
considerations, because it means queens able to give extra powers to
adjacent friends with losing their abilities. However, it seems that the
cost and tempo is too great. I believe it's best to keep 6 as the max.

I acknowledge that the gradient is not that smooth... however, pieces with
4 or 5 stones and not quite equal: a stack of 5 just needs one tempo to
become a queen *and* can give away one stone and still be a rook. I think
that may be more than the value of one unpromoting pawn.

About the knight->bishop step, I agree that there's a larger cost for
such smaller gain, but bishops can travel faster and they only need one
tempo to become a rook. We should not forget that the promoting/demoting
possibilities of each piece adds to its own standard chess value.

If a player shifts stones between two stacks he's giving initiative to
the adversary. If that is used to achieve a closed draw position, I
believe it's ok, if we think it's ok for FIDE Chess.

'Now, promoting a Rook to Queen, dispite the gain of 1.5 to 2 Pawns is
less obviously a good idea because of the leveling effect.'

And because it takes two tempi, not one.  You can use two tempi and two
Pawns to change a Rook to a Queen, two Bishops and two Pawns to two Rooks,
or a Rook and two Pawns to three Knights.  Or two Bishops and two Pawns
into four Knights.  Which would you rather have?  That is a question
anawerable only by playtesting.

Hi Michael,

Well, about single 'protons' powers, I wanted to keep the flavour of
FIDE Chess. It would be possible to imagine many Betza's Diff Chess
configurations. That would mean that 'abstract chess' would be more than
one game, it'd be a game system.

The reason of keeping single protons is related to the fact that it's not
valid to place a proton on an empty square. I do think that this rule
should be enforced, because there's a cost of creating an army of few
powerful pieces: you lose flexibility!

About the idea of transferring protons based on the move range, it sounds
good (I didn't think of it) but (maybe) there's a drawback: powerful
pieces get even stronger. But hey, we are here to try new ideas :^)

I wish to keep as many open possibilities as possible, but without opening
any nasty Pandora box (and there lies the art of game design, imho).

In fact, when you take a Pawn and use it to promote a piece,
then you lose one piece (you cannot demote to an empty cell). 
It's not very good to have very few pieces because that 
implies on little manoeuvrability: one would be playing abstract
chess, the other just chess.

About Lawson's suggestion, it sounds good. That's the beauty
of new games, many open and unexplored possibilities, even 
if we always have to face that the game can be broken in the 
long term.

I've played two face 2 face games with a friend and the games
went ok. That's not enough to judge a game, but it is a good 
start :)