Comments by lilyhollow

I do expect this to be more drawish than fide chess. I think you would need to pair this with some other significant changes to the game in order to fully take advantage of it. Like maybe more power on the board, or another win condition, or a drop mechanic or something.

I'm most interested in what this would do to the opening though. That would be fun to see.

This variant was very influential on me; I found it specifically because I was looking for variants that used cannons, but the pawns really hooked me.

I'm in agreement that the starting position is odd. I would push everything back a row, and then just find a starting square for the nightriders that makes sure they're not immediately attacking anything. 

This is kind of a criticism of the nightrider itself, but in practice it's probably not fun to constantly keep track of what pieces it's threatening from far away. The piece seems fun but I feel like there are other possibilities that don't require so much 'proofreading' of the board.

I like the 'king reaches the last row' win condition. On such a large board, especially if everything were pushed back a row to begin with, it may be logical to change that to 'king passes the midline.' Not necessary, but not an extreme possibility either.

Those knights would maybe end up being the strongest pieces in the game, which is significant because there are two of them. For reference, in crazyhouse, knights are like barely worse than rooks. But I think these knights gain more from promotion than the bishop and rook do.

That's not necessarily a good or bad thing, just something of note!

Yes, though I ended up crediting Chess 2 since the piece is directly lifted from that game, including the fact that it cannot be captured.