Single Comment

David, thank you very much. Of pieces I've designed, the Hero and Shaman are my two favorite straight chess pieces, if you can call a pair of twisty shatranj pieces that. This game and these 2 pieces are the furthest I've gone so far in shortrange development in a standard chess environment. They came from the flexible and twisted knights of Atlantean Barroom Shatranj, when I realized I could cut those 2 pieces in half and still have a piece that was almost as powerful and considerably simpler. 

Originally they were set up in the standard rook and bishop positions, with a knight between them, all flanking a king and guard. After pushing pieces a little, I came to the conclusion that the knights were redundant, so I replaced them with the heroes; and then I had the 2 corner squares empty. Now I needed a piece that was shortrange and reasonably but not too powerful, and that could be developed without too many contortions in a game with shatranj [1-step] pawns. The FAD seemed ideal to me, as it is both powerful and limited, being unblockable, quite shortrange, and colorbound. [The specific starting squares of all the colorbound pieces has, I think, a lot to do with why and how this game works.] Finally, I replaced the queen analog, the guard, with the hawklet/bent sliding general, as it has a fair chance of taking out a piece attacking itself or the king, unlike a guard, which cannot even block the other pieces, much less defend against or make a serious attack on them.

While I was working on everything in the above paragraph, this game spun off a variant of its own, which got posted first - Chieftain Chess. And that game started my foray into the really large variants.