Game Reviews by CarlosCetina

I cannot less than celebrate, Charles, your choice of including the sissa in one of your game designs. Excellent!

Certainly, this piece has not been adequately explored in other chess systems. I have had the oportunity of seeing some of its peculiarities on an 8x8 board starting from the randomly positions of my Cetina Random Chess and Cetran Chess 2 proposals.

'Instead of boring the player with arcane references to complex, convoluted, and contrived theoretical jargon,...', as you just say, I would like to show here some samples of THE SISSA IN ACTION!

At the following position White to move:

White moves Sc1+ [moving path: d1-c2-c1 or d1-d2-c1 / checking path: c1-h1-c6]:

At the same time the sissa is menacing the rook by c1-c2-b3 or c1-b2-b3. Obviously if Blue moves his king, would lose his rook. Fortunately Blue has salvation by moving Rf3 that obstructs the h1-c6 diagonal, interrupting, cutting the check:

At the following position Blue to move:

In the real game Blue moved Kd5, but what would happen if he moves c4?...

... White would make Sa5+...

... moving path: b3-a4-a5 / checking path: a5-b5-c6. Notice that the sissa covers both b5 (a5-a6-b5 or a5-a4-b5) and d5 (a5-a8-d5). Blue is losing his pawn on c4, so Kc5 is unique...

But now White makes the surprising and spectacular movement Se5+!

Moving path: a5-a1-e5 / Checking path: e5-c7-c5 or e5-e7-c5 or e5-e3-c5.

The sissa covers
b5 by e5-e8-b5;
c6 by e5-d5-c6 or e5-d6-c6 and
d5 by e5-d6-d5 or e5-d4-d5 or e5-e6-d5 or e5-e4-d5.

Blue has two options: Kd6 and Kd4. If makes Kd6, obviously would lose his pawn on c4. And if he makes Kd4? Let's see it:

Then White wins the rook by moving Sd7+...

...moving path: e5-e6-d7 or e5-d6-d7 / checking path: d7-g7-d4 or d7-g4-d4. The rook is captured by d7-c7-b6 or d7-c6-b6.

Viewing these examples of what the sissa can do on an 8x8 board, we can hope reasonably that on a 10x10 its powerful will be increased greatly, overall by acting in combination with the remain venomous pieces.

The additional Commoner moves to rooks, knights and bishops increases the complexity of the game in a manner so exquisite that immediately induces me to transfer the concept to the symmetric setup on a 9x8 board.

José: Would you like to try it? I bring forward a fantastic game! We could play it with or without dropping ministers, as you like.

Following Fergus's suggestion for naming the symmetric setup, I would name this new variant: Ajax Bigamous Chess.

Daniil: Your proposal seems to me very interesting. I have edited a preset for playing on a 9x8 board.

Preset's URL: /play/pbm/play.php?game%3DThere+is+no+queen+but+two+compounds%26settings%3D9x8

Please let me know if you would like to try it.

Thank you, Jörg. I did not know the Jelliss' writing "Theory of Journeys". I will study it carefully.

We can get a first approach to the relative strength of these nightriders by placing them on the central square (g7) of a 13x13 board and counting the number of squares affected/checked from there.

Doing it, we would find these results:

NN11	Diagonal Wide Crooked Nightrider	56
NN02	Straight Wide Crooked Nightrider	36
NN31	Quintessence	36
NN00	Rose	32
NN33	Diagonal Narrow Crooked Nightrider	24
NN21	Standard Nightrider	24
NN04	Straight Narrow Crooked Nightrider	20

Hence, the following equivalences should be near to be true:

NN11 = NN00 + NN33 = NN00 + NN21 = NN31 + NN04 = NN02 + NN04