Comments by silverpie
Are the new pawns allowed a 2-step first move?
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The term "royal" in this context specifically means the "capture/mate me to win" property. The term "prince" has been used both for pieces with the King-move but no such property (Tempête sur l'Échiquier comes to mind) and for pieces that serve as a backup royal (Chu Shogi, Tamerlane). Prince is a reasonable term for either, but the clarification is also reasonable.
Possible variant on that: use Q' etc. to indicate the pieces of black's starting army, and the plain letters for white's. That way, each symbol still means the same thing no matter which side it's on.
Or use English symbols QRBN for one color and German symbols DTLS for the other...
"Also, do Dragons block Queens as Alibabariders usually move, or can they block Queens on the squares they leap over (As a semi-leaping Queen)?" As I read it, Dragons have no influence whatsoever on the squares they leap. For example, a Dragon on d1, controlling the line d3-d5-d7-d9, would not stop an opposing Queen moving a6-h6, crossing at odd distance from the Dragon. "On one other note, why promote your pawns to Knights rather than Unicorns?" In order to promote to a Unicorn, you must have lost one of your starting Unicorns.
On the prefixes: given the four "basic" (European, Warhead, Ambush, Nonchalant) patterns of capture/non-capture allowed, we have prefixes for those with zero (Ancient), four (Eurofighter), or two (all six ways) powers. Missing are those with three. Proposals: anti-European (must capture at least once): HUNGRY anti-Warhead (may not capture twice): DIETING (no second helpings!) anti-Ambush (if first is passive, second must be too): ELECTRIC ("It has to warm up... so it can kill you" of Wednesday Addams' electric chair) Anti-Nonchalant (if first is capture, second must be too: ADDICTED (gotta keep killin'...)
You only have 15 pieces, so 'at-least-one' implies 'exactly-one.' On the commentary, a piece with eight bindings is thrice colorbound, not four times (which would mean full coverage requires sixteen). At the fourth order, it is switching (as the Ferz is at the second order and the Knight at the first).
Isn't the running-leaf by definition stronger than a queen, since the queen is a subset of it? (That is, if the 'degenerate' planar move in which one side of the plane is 1 is an allowable move.) And I can tell that the young-lion is not allowed to return to its original square (a limitation not shared by the Japanese lion), but there is one slight unclear point: is it allowed to make double captures?
I think the 'and then three' comment is redundant for the Knight, since six Knight-leaps in the same direction would require a board of 13 squares in at least one dimension. Hmmm... using such a piece in a variant with a larger board, could the Rook and Bishop go 'and then four,' or is three the speed limit? Come to think of it, a piece like this with a 'speed limit' of 2 might be interesting-- the Rookwise piece would be color-changing, while the Bishopwise one would remain colorbound, but switch Alfil-bindings... hmm, I just reinvented the Panda and the Bear.
'Uncovered pawns are not that problematic because any situation will have to be set up randomly very short before a game starts. Looking at the Shogi game there are indeed three uncovered pawns in the beginning and the game still does exist today. Capablanca's chess is somehow different to that because of the huge number of possible starting arrays viewing all shuffled combinations.' I think the problem is more a matter of the piece set and shape of the board. Even if a pawn is undefended in a Fischerandom setup, it can't be attacked instantly, unless it's an a/b/g/h pawn and the piece on its diagonal is a bishop or queen. But an archbishop or chancellor has a pretty good chance of being able to make an instant attack on that pawn by jumping over its own pawn row (as the chancellor can indeed do to the i-pawn in Capablanca's setup), and the diagonal discovered attack can affect 80% of the pawns instead of half. Upon further review, we're discussing opposite ends of the issue. The points I just made are why the no-undefended-pawn rule is desirable; the large number of positions is what makes it practical (i. e. you still have a huge pool of positions to choose from).
My suggestion for castling would be as follows: the corner disk must not have moved, and must have the potential to be a rook (castling will reveal it to be a rook). Pawn promotion is also potentially awkward. I propose a variant of the Grand Chess rule (a pawn may not move to the last if the owner already has seven quantum pieces, revealed or unrevealed, but may still give check). I also propose that pawns promote revealed. I would also note that this variant can be combined with many others, such as Capablanca/GrandChess, Different Armies, or even Jetan (to practice the mechanics, you could also go the other way and apply it to Los Alamos Chess).
Actually, vertex-then-side does not allow a knight to land on the same color. It will pass through its own color, then land on a different one. Also, what is the logic behind which three lines a rook/queen may use? The diagrams show three lines, but there are three others that equally fit the description of the move.
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The yellow boxes become unreadable in dark mode (remember the rule: specify both background and foreground, or specify neither).