Airplane Chess
Keys "s"=save "l"=load "b"=back once
R. Wayne Schmittberger, 1981. Airplanes move as queens any distance, capturing by landing just beyond an enemy unit.
Hans
Bodlaender's Chess Variants
Hans Bodlaender's
Chess Applet
These are simple illustrations rather than strong opponents.
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Written by Ed Friedlander
Airplane Chess
. Schmittberger's big-board variant featuring the very mobile Airplane (with zrf). (10x10, Cells: 100) By M Winther.
Airplane Chess. R. W. Schmittberger's Airplane Chess on the Game Courier. (10x10, Cells: 100) Author: Abdul-Rahman Sibahi. Inventor: R. Wayne Schmittberger.
| Date | Name | Rating | Comment | Edit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
 Airplane Chess. (10x10, Cells: 100) | ||||
Abdul-Rahman Sibahi  | None | I like this game! The Airplane works surprisingly well with the other pieces. I wonder how the game would play like without the Archbishop and the Chancellor and on a 8x8 board. OR with all the pieces lined up on a 12x12 board. -- Btw, as the applet is working, pawns are Omega Chess pawns. I would've thought that the pawns were Wildebeest Chess pawns. Which way is it ? | Edit View [*] | |
R. Wayne Schmittberg  | None | Grasshoppers capture by displacement, but airplanes don't--they capture the enemy piece, if any, on the next-to-last square of the airplane's move. Also, an airplane can jump over any number of men of either or both colors, making it much more mobile than a queen, but a grasshopper can only jump a single piece and so can be blocked. The idea of buying an army with points definitely allows for a good handicap system, and it's also possible to equalize White's and Black's chances by giving Black a little more to spend. | View [*] | |
| Mark Thompson | None | The Airplane seems to be the same piece as the Grasshopper, unless I'm missing something. Airplane figurines would probably be easier to find than Grasshoppers, though, and less creepy. Oops, no it's not. Grasshoppers MUST jump something to move, and can't jump friendly pieces. | Edit View [*] | |
| Mark Thompson | None | I love the idea of buying pieces for each game, and wish someone would implement this on a server. (Wouldn't that be a terrific attraction to add to the growing gamesmagazine-online website, for instance!) That's the only idea for a CV I've ever heard that would actually merit being forecast as 'the future of Chess.' The piece values and the players' budgets for hiring their armies would have to depend on the size and shape of the board, right? And probably on the relative strength of the players -- one thing that strikes me as especially appealing about this concept being its usefulness for handicapping. | Edit View [*] | |
| R. Wayne Schmittberg | None | Airplane Chess was never marketed commercially (nor was any other CV I've invented). The opening pawn setup is based on Turkish Grand Chess; the knights were the clear choice to start on the second-rank. It's been many years since I played it, but I checked my notes, and my estimated value for an airplane was 6.2 points (compared with 5.1 for a rook, 3.4 for a bishop, 3.2 for a knight, 1.0 for a pawn). However, this was apparently for an 8x8 board; values may change slightly on a 10x10 board. Footnote: Long ago I tried to work out values for many unorthodox chess pieces for use in a generalized chess game in which players would be given points to spend to buy their armies, and the players need not buy the same pieces at all. Taking it one step further, pieces not purchased for a certain number of games would have their costs reduced by 0.1 points (perhaps in some central computer?), while pieces that are purchased frequently would have their costs go up--a supply and demand system to empirically determine relative piece values as closely as possible in time. Around the same time Ralph Betza had a related idea (Betza's Simple Army Chess) to test relative piece values by pitting armies of different piece types against each other and seeing which one wins. | View [*] | |
| Number of ratings: 3, Average rating: Excellent, Number of comments: 9 | ||||
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http://www.chessvariants.com/play/erf/Airplane.html |