Check out Symmetric Chess, our featured variant for March, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Nov 11, 2014 08:00 AM UTC:
The problem with this is that when there are multiple color-bound pieces on each side you often know only in the end-game which color you need the piece to be on to not make it a hopeless draw (as with unlike Bishops). Depending on which of the pieces were traded and which survived to the end-game.

I was facing this problem when designing Team-Mate Chess, because I wanted to have several color-bound pieces there (because these can give interesting 4-men end-games, with checkmate not forcible in all corners). But if you start with 3 color-bound pieces they cannot all be on different color.

So I toyed with the idea to equip all color-bound pieces with the right to swap places with an orthogonally adjacent King, once in their lifetime. This to minimize the possibility that they can abuse this right for tactical purposes. An alternative, using a more conventional move would be to allow them a one-time Moa-hop over a friendly King. An idea from Superchess is to allow a permanent extra color-changing W-step in the board corners of the final rank (to which you presumably only have access in the end-game).

In the end I used none of that, but solved it by putting only two color-bound pieces in the initial setup, starting on different colors, and making the third piece (the strongest one) only available through promotion. (So that the player could under-promote to a non-color-bound piece if the promotion square happened to be of the wrong-color.)

Edit Form

Comment on the page Universal Chess

Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.