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Complete Chess. with a riding and a leaping piece family.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2020 08:30 PM UTC:

How pieces interact with Pawns has a profound influence on their value. Because there are so many Pawns around. Whether a passer is unstoppable in a Pawn ending is determined by the famous "rule of squares". For a Ferz the area is nearly as large as for the King. The color binding doesn't hurt much, as it is not that important on what color you stop the Pawn, as long as you do it before it reaches the promotion square. For a Wazir the area where it can stop a passer is much smaller. I would indeed expect the Wizard to be better than the Wazir-Knight on a large board, due to its increased ability for catching up with Pawns. On 8x8 it might suffer from the Camel move falling off board too often.


Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2020 08:02 PM UTC:

If you measure the physical length, a diagonal move is longer by sqrt(2).  Ralph Betza speculated that this increased length was one of the reasons a ferz was worth more than a wazir.  (The other being that it had two forward-facing attacks.)  The longer length could be considered to come into play in some situations.  Moving from a1 to c3, for example, is two moves for a ferz but four for a wazir.  But that could also just be considered a quirk of the geometry.  The knight has a longer move still and it also requires four moves to go from a1 to c3.

Does the rotating of the knight-wazir into a wizard make it more powerful because the moves are longer?  Possibly.  It becomes colorbound, but the camel move is good for reaching behind pawn lines.  Opulent Chess features both the knight-wazir and the wizard and I consider them to be of equal value, at least under typical circumstances. (Actually, looking at that page now, I see that I had ranked the wizard to be worth a quarter pawn less, but I no longer believe that is true.)


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2020 07:51 PM UTC:

I just published this game to the site. I also added links and capitalization. I don't know my math well enough to know whether the part about sqrt(2) makes sense. Since Ben has his Ph.D. in mathematics, I'll let him comment on that.


💡📝Thomas wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2020 04:30 PM UTC:

I have added the initial setup squares to the piece description. Also I have slightly altered the setup so that all pawns are defended at the beginning of the game.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sat, Apr 25, 2020 07:25 PM UTC:

This looks like an interesting game, but the description is not yet complete. While a reader could guess at what each piece in the setup diagram is, he shouldn't have to. Please provide a legend indicating which piece is on each space, or provide an image with your description of each piece. You may use shortcodes to display pieces from the same set you made the diagram with. Documentation on using shortcodes to display pieces is given in How to Design and Post Your Own Game.


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