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Wide Nightrider Chess. Chess on a 12x10 board with Nightriders, Champions and fast castling rules.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Kevin Pacey wrote on Sun, Feb 26, 2023 01:45 AM UTC in reply to David Paulowich from Sat Feb 18 10:23 PM:

"David Paulowich wrote on 2023-02-18 UTC [1] Adding "Nightrider" and "Modern Elephant" Tags to your games, as appropriate, will help to attract more readers.

[2] My Elephant (AmD) in Shatranj Kamil (64) is one-half of a Champion (WAD), moving to eight empty Squares and attacking four of them. But you probably want a piece that reaches more than 25 percent of the board.

[3] I had no idea how rarely my King's Leap Rule appears in chess variants. I authored a Zillions of Games file called King's Leap Chess that was never "zipped" - contains readable text. I notice Contemporary Random Chess using both a strange form of castling and the (sideways only) King's Bunker Leap, which cannot move over a square that is either occupied or under attack by an enemy piece. That page also has a link to the King to Bunker Leap page, by Charles Daniel in 2009."

I've added tags extensively to my rules pages (sometimes even preset pages), as well as to many of other people's games (particularly those I know I like). There seems to be very few folks tagging pages anymore otherwise, at this point in time. A future issue might be, if everyone tags practically everything in the Alphabetical Index, we're almost right back where we started (if you see what I mean). :)

The King's Leap rule was used historically, but somehow got abandoned - maybe people were glad to connect the rooks while bringing the K to safety, while still giving the other side a sporting chance vs. the K before it might castle the modern FIDE way (or other mild deviations from it, in the case of CVs), it seems. However, in FIDE chess at elite level, even, Black cannot always take getting castled for granted, while White can pretty much, due to White's birthright initiative (I read a Grandmaster wrote such, somewhere).

In the case of my own Fast Castling rule (first used in my 12x8 Wide Chess), the CV inventions I've used it in so far have largely remained little (or un-) played - Wide Nightrider Chess has been played the most so far, yet I suspect it's mostly because a lot of people like to try playing with Nightriders. Otherwise, some sort of a King's Leap rule (like Fast Castling) is especially useful for wide board CVs (another solution is to move the rooks closer to the middle, but people are conservative about that too, besides not using conventional castling, it seems to me).

edit: link to Wide Chess rules page:

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/wide-chess

edit: list of logs for finished Wide Nightrider Chess games:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/logs.php?age=0&stat=any&gamewcp=Wide+Nightrider+Chess

There were precedents for my Fast Castling rule. One CV had K's leap-castling in spite of pieces in-between, say on the 1st rank, while another had castling as usual, except castling through an attacked cell was allowed. Neither CV was much played so far, though. Did people balk? Maybe the CVs had other things people didn't like about them.

edit: added in 2 links re: CVs I mentioned:

https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/quinquereme.html

https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/21st-century-chess.html

I have a high number of CV ideas on the drawing board, but almost all use Fast Castling rules, so I'm afraid to eventually submit them all unless a few games that use that rule become more popular first.