Comments by JorgKnappen

Another close (but not exact) match is the Eohippos (German Urpferdchen) from 10 directional chess (see http://www.chessvariants.com/contests/10/10_directional.html ). It moves and captures the same way, not in a pawnish style.

The Knight-Fers compound (NF) is also often seen under many different names, my favourite name is Dullahan (a male counterpart to a Banshee, featured under this name in the "Fearful Fairies" http://www.chessvariants.com/invention/fearful-fairies – other names include "prince" (problemist usage) or "Priest" (Scirocco, http://www.chessvariants.com/invention/scirocco )).

The Squire Knight is a definitely a Rook-class piece with 4 new capturing moves and 2 new non-capturing moves. Experience shows that additional capturing moves are worth more than additional non-capturing moves. The Squire Knight has 12 targets to aim at ... quite impressive.

I am pretty sure that Squire Knight makes an enjoyable and easy-to-learn chess variant.

While there are lots of evil creatures (to be associated with the Orcs) in Tolkiens legendarium, the number of good or ambivalent races is rather limited. There are Goblins, Hobgoblins, Uruk-Hai, Trolls, Balrogs, Dragons and Worms, Wargs, and the Nazgul with their (unnamed) flying animals.

For the airforce of the "good ones", there are the Eagles (taking part in the Battle of Five Armies). Than, there are the Ents, and maybe an Ent is a good picture for a rookish piece. Of course you can look up other mythologies for suitable names.

An excellent for the great rewrite.

Bugs in implementation?

I played this game against the computer using Firefox under Linux and I found the following strange behavious:

1. Sometimes, the computer moved its King to the centre of the board and the game ended. I see reasons for the computer to resign in the concrete situation (and it does not resign in really lost postions). I noticed that castling was a promising move for the computer.

2. When I get a pawn through to promotion, I cannot choose a piece to promote it to. I get a white band over the middle files of the boards, but cannot click on anything. There is a (x) mark, but it does not close the white band either.

It seems that the Chess Variant you are thinking of has been invented
before, see http://www.chessvariants.org/diffmove.dir/amazone.html on this
site.

Nice game with the obvious traces of play-testing.

It is not explicitly stated in the description: I assume, the game ends when the King is checkmated on the top board, i.e., a King cannot be "buried"?

It works for me, when I call the game submission page

http://www.chessvariants.org/index/membersubmission.php

I find your name and userid at the very last position (Hebrew letters sort
after Latin letters).

Something is strange today: When I visit this site without logging in, "Tandem Chess" is listed under "Your Favorites". (It is the only favorite for an anonymous visitor of this site)

The favorites list of Tandem Chess displays only two names, the favorites count is 3 (under the entry Bughouse Chess).

Looks like a bug to me.

This poor goes to the "game" described as a two person game. It isn't. The player who starts with white has the full control of the game and the player who starts with black is a poor bystander bound to be declared the loser by his opponent.

Why? White is in control of creating the first chain. He can deliberately wait until black is also ready to create a chain. Now the following goes on: White creates a chain, switches, black creates a chain, switches, white creates or modifies a chain, switches, and so on, until a checkmate is reached.

You can save the good ideas in this game by reformulating it as a puzzle or solitaire game (The solitaire player solves the puzzle, when he can reach checkmate with an unbroken chain of chains; otherwise he fails). To make the puzzle more interesting; vary the initial position (Fischer Random, Random pawn, both).

Reaching checkmate by a chain of chains may also be a nice fairy chess problem condition.

There is of course one dark spot in all strength measurements by computer ... chess programs aren't very good in the opening without an opening book. Some good opening book (but where to get it from?) could change all evaluations. Nevertheless, testing without an opening book is all we have for a new chess variant,

Great game!

There is a minor glitch in the first diagram: It has two back Leopards (artefacts from an earlier version that was discarded?) in e/i 12.

No, RoAR didn't come out yet. It turned out to be more difficult than expected to create an initial array that is playable (and it may be impossible in an 8x8 setup).

BTW: Thanks for the PBM setup :-)

I like the idea of the many interesting new endgames. I just hope that the endgames 3 vs. 2 are decisive (at least when one of the 3 is an adjutant and the left over piece from the 2 is a minor one); otherwise the game will be very drawish.

Here are more ...

*) You cannot drop a piece to your 8th rank (all pieces in Pocket Mutation
Chess)

... and what about colourbound pieces? Any restrictions for keeping the
original colour binding or for not having two on the same colour? (I am not
aware of games stating such rules, but they look very natural to me)

An excellent to Carlos Cetina for the really nice diagram.

All Knight moves in the first step are "equal" (in the sense of symmetry), but the continuations fall in two classes that Jelliss terms "3D" (crossing the diagonal, the pure trajectories in Carlos' diagram) and "3L" (crossing the lateral, the "impure" trajectories in Carlos' diagram). Here's a reference on the terminology:

http://www.mayhematics.com/t/2b.htm#%282%29

Splitting the Quintessence into a diagonal and lateral piece is surely feasible and the pieces should both be very playable.

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The German and French term (Spiralspringer and Cavalier spirale) are generic (like crooked Nightrider), for further precision they are qualified (German: enger Diagonalspiralspringer = wide [sic!] diagonal crooked Nightrider etc.)

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Yes, the Nachtmahr army put a lot more of strength on the board than the FIDEs: Just exchange whatever Nightrider against Queen, the Rooks, and one Bishop and you are left with a stronger rest of the army. And because of the huge forking power of the Nahctmahrs, I don't see a chance for the FIDEs to avoid this.

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On relative piece strength: The here termed "wide" pieces are clearly the strongest: They have an enormous "capturing density" and the can-mate property. The classical Nightrider is the weakest, the others are in-between.

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I'd like to see your design of Nachtmahr II (allthough I cannot promise to have time for discussion)

BBC thought about the flag question almost a year ago ... here are some
designs

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25205017

(BTW, I find the "German Jack" in black, red and gold quite funny)

and here are 25 more designs:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25222891

(BTW, I like Dave Parker's and Michael Elliot's designs)

Here are a few more names for the same piece: Thoat (from Jetan, Edgar Rice Burroughs), Emperor (problemist's usage), and Marquis (from Scirocco, Typhoon, and Jupiter by Adrian King, also used in Töws' generic chess piece creation system, in Derzhanski's list of chess pieces, in the Sweeping Switchers by myself, and in Thronschach by Glenn Overby II)

I don't see how the Cylindrical Cinders can capture a Rook on move 1. For cylindrical chess a board glued between the files h1--8 and a1--8 is usually assumed. A cylindrical bishop can move, e.g.,  from a1 to h2, but not from a1 to, say, b8. Even though the rooks are initially unprotected, they are not directly reachable for the Cinders behind their wall of pawns.

Gluing the board the other way round, along the ranks (a-h)1 and (a-h)8 is very unusual and you would start up with the opposite Kings in direct contact.