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The board is about as intuitively natural as any 43 square board could possibly be. I'm not quite sure I like the array nearly as much though: It's crowded! With so many pieces that can move so far, it seems like they need a little more space. I like the pieces though, although I think that the two step and three step aren't quite as orthogonal as the rest of them. The basilisk and the pawns in particular, are extremely interesting. Kind of wondering what a Dabbah-rider is though, I've never seen the piece before and therefore can't understand what the role of the slip-rook is. The idea of making an offset array on an offset board sounds really cool when you think about it, but now that I'm looking at it: It's ugly. The previous comment about the pawns shouldn't really be so much of a problem. On a board that has only 43 squares and 14 pawns, they take up about a third of the board at the beginning, and they become a much more generally useable piece when you get rid of all but one of them. The two-step and three-step have a range that's much less limited than it sounds, considering the size of the board, and are more useful than initial impressions might make you believe. The king, however, seems extremely weak. With so many pieces that can move so far on orthogonal lines, and with the existence of the basilisk, it seems awfully easy to checkmate him. The gun is a nice try, and is really clever, but doesn't seem to do the trick. I think it would be more interesting if he wasn't restricted to orthogonal motion, althought this might make it too hard to checkmate him, considering that the other pieces are restricted to such orthogonal movements. On the whole, its kind of hard to tell what I think of this game. I like a lot of your ideas, but they don't seem very cohesive.