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Grotesque Chess. A variant of Capablanca's Chess with no unprotected Pawns. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

🕸💡📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Sep 22, 2004 11:59 PM UTC:

I perused Pritchard's ECV today, and I did find one game that had a
castling rule like Grotesque Chess's. The game is Supercapablanca Chess,
a 12x8 version of Capablanaca's Chess. Its castling rule states that a
King may move two, three, or four spaces toward the Rook. Its castling
rule would be equivalent to that of Grotesque Chess within the context of
Grotesque Chess, though as I worded the rule for Grotesque Chess, its rule
would not be equivalent to that of Supercapablanca Chess on its longer
board, since it would also allow the King to move five spaces toward the
Rook.

If I needed to, I would have just reworded the rule to match that of
Supercapablanca Chess. But I am grateful that you're willing to let
anyone 'use this form of modified free castling ... in any variant.'

I came to this form of castling mainly from a programming perspective. In
Game Courier, I had been distinguishing castling from a King's usual move
by noting where the King moves to. But when I thought of implementing
unrestricted free castling, this wasn't going to work out. Even more of a
problem from a programming perspective was giving the Rook a choice of
which space to move to. As I thought about the matter more, I concluded,
as you have too, that unrestricted free castling is basically two moves in
one, and that makes castling too powerful.