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Diamond Morph Board Mutator

Take a 10x10 chessboard, and allow movement both on the 100 squares/cells of the board and on the corners of the squares, that is, on all the intersections of vertical and horizontal lines making up the 11x11 grid that defines the 10x10 board. This gives 221 board positions, and the unit cell is a centered square lattice. The board can be considered to be 2 interlocking 2D square patterns with the corners of the squares of 1 pattern marking the center of the squares of the other pattern. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-centered-square-lattice-structure-Between-each-full-circles-the-bond-represents-a_fig3_49907947 This board has some unusual properties. 

If you try to maintain the standard moves of the chesspieces on this board, the first thing you notice is that it's the rooks that are bound to roughly half the board. A rook that starts the game in a cell can only move from cell to cell, and never on the lattice, and the rook that starts on a lattice intersection can never move into a cell, because only diagonal moves allow you to go between cells and lattice intersections. And that means the bishops are not bound to only part of the playing surface. It's a rook - bishop reversal of roles. 

The wazir’s orthogonal moves on this board are simple and obvious: you step from 1 cell to an adjacent cell through the common side of the 2 cells, or you step from 1 intersection to an orthogonally adjacent intersection, moving along the grid line. But the diagonal moves are not quite so simple. One diagonal step takes you from cell to intersection or intersection to cell. It takes a diagonal move of 2 steps to bring a piece from cell to cell or intersection to intersection. So how does a ferz move? Does it always step 1 and so change between cells and intersections with each move? Or does it always step 2, thus re-binding itself to either cells or intersections? I will argue that the player should have the choice for a ferz of taking 1 or 2 steps for each move, and the same for any piece that has a diagonal move, like the knight.  It’s certainly not necessary, but I feel that if you use this board you should consider using the expanded diagonal move: 2 diagonal steps to bring the piece back to the same subset of locations, cells or intersections, *and* the 1 step which changes the subset of locations the piece ends on. The board is more than double the size of a “standard” 10x10 board (221 playable locations vs. 100) so allow the extra moves a ferz would get with 1 and 2 step options. 

This applies to the knight, which can be considered to move either 1 step orthogonally and then 1 or 2 steps diagonally, doubling its movement power, or diagonally then orthogonally, although you might make it a slider then, rather than a leaper. I lean against allowing the knight to move 1 step diagonally, 1 step orthogonally, and then a second step diagonally, as this can be considered violating the spirit of the knight’s move. (Or not!)

One feature of this board is that it takes exactly the same number of steps to go from 1 location to another either orthogonally or diagonally or any combination of the two. On a standard 2D checkered board, that is very much not true. What it all means is that I’m playing with the underlying geometry of the board. The board locations are all “actually” diamonds, and the “rooks” actually go through the corners of those diamonds, thus becoming ‘bishops.’ And on that underlying diamond board, the “bishops” go through the sides of the diamonds, thus becoming ‘rooks’ despite the way it looks like they move on the game board. To visualize the ‘actual’ board, take a unit cell, mark the midpoints of each side, then draw straight lines from the top and bottom points to the 2 side points. Do that for every cell, and you get a diamond pattern. Each unit cell of the game board contains 2 diamonds, a complete 1 in the center of the cell, and the other is quartered and stuck in the corners. 

If I knew how to actually make this board in Game Courier I would, but – for those who have seen any of the Jumanji movies, my weakness is modern tech :\ - I do have an experimental game for the board I’ve described. There are 21 pawns and 21 pieces per side in the game. They are set up in 4 rows (“ranks”) along opposite edges of the board, which I do not think should be checkered in the standard way, but rather the way Fergus made the newish Shatranj board, a basic marbled white board with 2x2 squares of light green laid over the center 4 squares of the board, with the pattern shifted 4 squares orthogonally and repeated, in every direction. For a 10x10 board, this would give 9 2x2 green squares, 4 in the corners and the remaining 5 in a “+” shape spaced evenly between the corners. Anyway, here’s the setup, legend at bottom:

  P	P     P	    P	  P	P     P	    P	  P     P
P    P	   P	 P     P     P	   P	 P     P     P     P	      
  R	H     N     B	  G	G     B     N	  H	R 
R    H	  HP	 S   DWAF    K	 DWAF    S     HP    H	   R

P = pawn	G = guard(mann)
R = rook	HP = high priestess
H = hero	S = shaman
N = knight	DWAF = pasha
B = bishop