Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Well, the equality of a lone Bishop & Knight (both 3.25 Pawns) was what Larry Kaufman found from statistical analysis of a huge database of grandmaster games. If you are talking about deviations of the order of 0.05 Pawn, I doubt that this will be measurable, or even meaningful. Because piece values are by definition averages, and it serves no purpose to know the average much more precise than the typical deviation. Total material balance also depends on how well pieces cooperate, or combat each other, as the case of 3 Queens vs 7 Knights dramatically shows. Kaufman himself already investigated how the B-N difference depends on the number of Pawns, and did indeed find a dependence, where it is better to have Knights if there are many Pawns, but better to have Bishops with very few Pawns. AFAIK he did not try to correlate it with the shade of the Pawns (probably because such a thing is not always easily defined, if the Pawn chains are not fully interlocked). The 'good Bishop' vs 'bad Bishop' probably has a much larger effect than average Bishop vs total number of Pawns.

Common wisdom has it that "3 tempi is a Pawn", which would equate a tempo to 33cP. That makes that for nearly equivalent pieces the actual difference will be mostly determined by where they are located (centralized vs on the edge), as moving them to improve their location is so costly it already defeats the purpose. The difference between having a Knight on e4 and having one on a1 would certainly be more than 0.05 Pawn.

I remember spending a lot of time on determining the value of limited range Rooks (R2 - R5), so the 400 cP I used with the Rockies is probably quite reliable. And you are right: your value for the Cardinal is definitely too low (all my tests point to A+P being slightly stronger than Q), and the unexpectedly large cooperativity bonus of the B and N move is most-likely indeed due to this concentration of attacks. If I watch games the Cardinal turns out to be extremely adept at annihilating enemy Pawn chains, and I gues this is because it can attack a Pawn, the square it can be pushed to, and a Pawn it protects, all at the same time. I am suspecting that orthogonally adjacent move targets are an asset by themselves, in addition to the individual moves. The Cardinal's 'footprint' has 16 of those, Queen and Marshal only 8. This would also explain why a Rook is still worth more than a Bishop (500 vs 400) on a cylinder board, where the average number of moves is about the same. (On 8x8 one square less for the Bishop, but one square can be rached through two paths, which should partly compensate that.)

It would be very interesting to do a more thorough investigation of pair bonuses. (Still on my ever-growing to-do list...) The only thing I tested so far is that two B-pairs seems exactly twice as strong as one pair. So it doesn't count as 2x2 pairs; the even Bishops are always worth 50cP more than the odd Bishops.

Hi H.G.

I did note in my (unchanged) Edit sentence just above the values that I gave (in my second last post in this thread) that my memory had been rather off, though I could have been more explicit about that pretty much negating my earlier remarks in the text about the ranking of the armies as I recalled it. A natural aversion to my eating crow, I suppose. :)

The effectiveness with which an army works together is indeed not necessarily reflected by the material sum of its parts.

I was happy many of our values for pieces of the 4 armies seemed relatively close to each other, with some notable exceptions (perhaps especially the Cardinal, Colonel and Short Rook). I can see how I might have underestimated a Cardinal (on 8x8 at least) since my primative formulas for valuations don't account for a Cardinal's great concentration of power within a 2 square radius around it, covering the same number of squares as a Chancellor or Queen would.

I still rate a knight as microscopically worse than a bishop on average, though I didn't bother to say so explicitly in my recent post on CWDA values. At least two chess grandmasters that have been in my area (besides some advanced chess books I read long ago) note that once a B is gone, it's harder to cover squares of its colour. I'd say that's since a knight takes at least two moves to cover a square of the same colour it wasn't already, whereas a B might often take only one move to do so. There is also that a B can sometimes trap a N against an edge of the board in an endgame. Of course, there are many other things to consider, but these things are what chessplayers have recently pointed out to me. Then there's my still not being 100% trusting of computer statistical studies/methodologies, but at times that comes down to vague doubts and my own intuition/studies as a chess player.

The values you added seem at odds with the text above it.

Note that the individual piece values Fairy-Max uses do not really add up to give the observed total strength of the army. In particular it seems to overestimate the Clobberers, and under-estimate Rookies and Nutters (which get about the same total as FIDE, which I will use as a reference). The values reported for color-bound pieces include half the pair bonus, as Fairy-Max does not explicitly keep track of such bonuses, and I always do the value determination of such pieces in pairs. This might be unrealistic for the Clobberers, as it will be difficult for them to conserve both pairs. And the color-bound pieces are significantly stronger than Bishop, so their pair bonus is probably larger too.

Another possible explanation could be that the Clobberers pieces poorly cooperate, in the sense that they do not complement each other's weaknesses, but tend to have the same. E.g. the Cloberrers have only one major piece. And 4 of the 6 minor pieces are quite valuable (about a Rook). So there is a fair chance that despite a large advantage in terms of piece value, they can often not win for lack of mating potential. That so many pieces are color bound makes it worse. You can end up with Fad + Bede on the same shade, an advantage numerically as large as 2 Rooks, but still a dead draw. And Fad or Bede + Pawn vs minor can be drawn by sacrificing the minor for the Pawn, or perhaps simply by having the King stand in the path of the Pawn on the other shade (so you could only win if you can somehow catch the minor to force that King to leave by zugzwang). If it would be a Bishop of opposite shade, it would obviously be impossible to harras it. And Fibnif or Woody Rook can always move to the other shade and safely stay there.

The Rookies might have an advantage that all their pieces have mating potential. On an individual piece mating potential doesn't seem very valuable, but when all your pieces have it, even a disadvantage as small as a Pawn might always be lost, for lack of drawing tricks. This could be worth something.

I've added some content to my previous post in this thread, with an edit (notably my own estimates of the relative material values for each army).

Indeed, I addressed this this inconsistency in a follow-up comment, at the time. Paper-Sciccors-Rock situations are very uncommon with piece values; usually the empirically determined value of a piece is highly independent on what you play it against. (Except for extreme situations such as 3 Queens vs 7 Knights; it has to be a mix of pieces of different value.) I guess that this is why 'piece value' is a useful concept in the first place.

It could be that the Clobberers are composed such that they can better exploit the most important weakness of the Nutters, namely that they cannot quickly pull back. The Clobberers have only one major piece, but they have several combinations of two minor pieces that together can force checkmate (through repetitive checking) on an unprotected King. As Kings tend to stay on the back rank until the late end-game, it is rather tempting for a naive Nutters player to abandon its King while aggressively attacking (possibly gaining significant material), to discover that a counter-strike expedition of two pieces will unescapably kill its King. I don't think any of the other armies has the ability to inflict mate with such a small force. (In FIDE there is the pair of Rooks, but that already fails when there is a Pawn to shelter behind, while the FAD can jump.)

So it seems it is more important for the Nutters to have some strategic knowledge (which Fairy-Max utterly lacks), namely that it should always keep a 'sweeper' piece near the back rank to defend its King against sudden break throughs. That the opponent also doesn't know that this is a weakness, and won't intentionally lure the Nutter pieces forward (e.g. by forcing them to make a forward distant recapture) only partly compensates this ignorance, as it will happen enough that the Nutters will just accidentally (unforced) move their pieces ahead. This is actually statistically likely, as the Nutter pieces in general have more forward than backward moves. So they tend to 'drift' forward when they would wander around aimlessly. In an engine with the required strategic knowledge the Nutters should do even better, though, and they were already one of the strongest. So if the method has a systematic error here, it is in the wrong direction.

The reason I was not so worried about 'disadvantaging' the Nutters by denying them the opportunity to promote to Queen / Marhall / Archbishop is that they already seem to have too strong an army despite this 'handicap'. Also, the disadvantage for the Clobberers that they cannot do better than Archbishop is not nearly as large as what Betza thought, as the Archbishop is unexpectedly strong. And also with this handicap, Clobberers seem stronger than FIDE. So I thought it entirely acceptable to limit promotion to each army's own super-piece.

If it would help, it would not be a bad idea to limit the Rookie's promotion choice to { Fibnif, Short Rook, Half Duck }, or perhaps even just to Fibnif. But such promotion limitations seem actually ineffective in altering the strength of an army.

I wanted to notice something in HG's old results.

I see the CC and the NN are balanced against each other but the CC behaves quite worse versus the RR (10%). So it seems same small but not insignificant rock-paper-scisors effect is taking place. This could be due to a possible need (I mentioned a long time ago in the different context) of a concept of multidimensional piece values. But it is probably more than that if any such thing is possible? The NN are a "pressure" army as they have more forward moves and the RR are usually slower as they can't turn a corner that easily. This seems a reduction of the weakness of the NN. On the other hand CC has the strategic weakness that it can be twice impaired by te lack of an counterpart of the other color bound piece.. RR can profit more easily from that as because of it slowness weakness it is a more strategic army herself. The NN don't have time for such debates. They need to "act" so they can't profit out of it.

Such lines of reasoning are most likely usefull but I can't pinpoint why I'm a bit uncomfortable with the idea of studying it exactly here. Maybe the game dimensions.

I looked up my old comment in this topic ( https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=31222 ). There I report that the Rookies were actually strongest of all. So RR >~ NN > CC > FF. This was based on the scores in 400-game matches between each pair of armies with Fairy-Max. In a comment just before it Fergus had arrived to the same conclusion based on ChessV (but with far fewer games). Fairy-Max randomizes the first 4 opening moves of each player, which should be enough to not have significant duplication of games. (I did not actually check for duplicate games.)

My experience with this kind of materialy-imbalanced testing is that the result is not very sensitive to the piece values used by the engine. E.g. if you give one player an Archbishop instead of a Queen, and assign it a value of 900 (where Q=950), the side with the Queen will score about 62%. If you then repeat the test with A=1000), the player with Queen will still score around 62%. The reason is likely that, as long as the values are different, 1-for-1 trading is not frequent, because there is always one player that thinks it is to his disadvantage, and will avoid it. And it does not matter much which player this is. The imbalance is therefore long-lived, and you measure the relative effectivity of the imbalanced pieces for doing (or helping to do) damage to the common pieces. Which is pretty much independent of how the computer values them, as they will mostly not be traded directly for other material (2-for-1 trades are also pretty rare).

So as long as both players share the misconception on actual value, the programmed value doesn't seem to be very critical. Of course it should not be totally off; if you set the value of a Queen below that of a Pawn, it will indeed get worth as much as a Pawn, because it will be immediately traded for one. There is just no way the other player could shield all its Pawns from Queen attack, before the Queen gets to see it can force a more profitable trade. If you assign reversed values to pieces that differ very much in power, the strong one will probably succeed to force it being traded for the weak one, which it mistakenly considers profitable.

Before I did the test with complete armies, I did similar tests on all individual pieces in the armies to determine their value. E.g. use FIDE as context, and then replace Rooks of one side by (say) HFD on the other, to see whether HFD is better or worse than an orthodox Rook (and by how much). In such tests I always make sure they are self-consistent, i.e. performed with the programmed value equal to the value suggested by the eventual score. If my initial guestimate of the value was wrong in this respect, I just repeat the test with the value suggested by the outcome of the flawed test. Which then usually does not significantly alter the outcome. This should have made the individual piece values more or less OK, so that the play during the whole-army tests must have been realistic, and thus must have made the sampling of what the pieces can do representative.

I am a bit surprised about the low score imbalance you get for CC-FF. My old results table says +9% for this (meaning the match score averaged over both colors was 59% in favor of the Clobberers). You get only 52.6%. What is the Pawn-odds score for ChessV (i.e. when you use equal armies, except that one of the players gets f2 or f7 deleted)?

These are the piece values Fairy-Max is using (Pawn = 100):

FIDE
Knight           325
Bishop           350
Rook             500
Queen            950

Clobberers
Waffle           320
Fad              480
Bede             530
Archbishop       875

Nutters
Fibnif           310
Charging Knight  400
Charging Rook    485
Colonel          935

Rookies
Woody Rook       310
Short Rook       400
Half Duck        480
Marshall         935

I'd rate the RR army and the FF army about the same, though the mobilitity of a Q may give an edge to the latter. The CC army would seem to be at least slightly better than either (based on material valuations) IMO, but noting, perhaps very significantly, that it seems it could often be really awkward to develop both of the two waffles (i.e. not just one) that a player has with any speed, especially with the Black pieces (the edge pawns being unprotected at the start doesn't help either, especially vs. a FIDE army, with its Q). The NN army seems clearly the best army of the 4 in theory to me (based on material valuations), except I've yet to play with it, rather than against it. Thus I find myself pretty much agreeing with H.G.'s assessment of the 4 armies' relative strengths, though perhaps for many differing reasons.

[Edit: It seems my memory of the relative strength of the 4 armies that I estimated long ago was rather off. In any case, here's my current tentative estimates of each army's relative strength (based on material valuations alone):]

FIDE:

Knight 3.5 approx. Bishop 3.5 Rook 5.5 Queen 10 Army (w/o Ps/K) 35

Clobberers:

Waffle 3.125 Fad 4.75 Bede 5.125 Cardinal 8 Army (w/o Ps/K) 34

Nutters:

Fibnif 3.125 Charging Knight 4 Charging Rook 4.9375 Colonel 8.9375 Army (w/o Ps/K) 33.06

Rookies:

Woody Rook 3.125 Short Rook 3.54 Half Duck 4.915 Marshall 10 Army (w/o Ps/K) 33.16

I think the NN despite their many weaknesses they have a wonderfull middle game. That should probably always do it!

@Greg The Bede thingie seems a good idea for me and it does sound more natural for a rook!

About the RR, I find the FDH quite akward and it sould be around rook level. It probably is not (but the R4 definetly compensates for it).

Anyway very nice effort on mister Betza part in an era when computers were much weaker :)!

BTW, I always interpreted the promotion rule in CWdA as that you could only promote to pieces of your own army. This seemed logical to me; promoting to pieces of the opponent army strikes me as unnatural and ugly. But now I believe this is not what Betza originally meant

The rule is definitely that you may promote to a piece in either army.  I know I've seen that explicitly stated, with reasoning, on one of Betza's pages here.  (There are quite a few auxiliary pages about CwDA, armies, and piece values by Betza on the Chess Variant Pages, some of which might not be in obvious locations.  This is something I've been meaning to look into cleaning up.)

But the Colonel has a major shortcoming: it cannot move backwards fast. All native Nutter pieces actually have that problem. So if it comes down to a promotion race, and they can only promote to their own pieces, the Nutters are toast.

Yes, this is exactly right.  It would make the act of pawn promotion for the Nutters wildly inferior to every other army if the they could only promote to their own pieces.

NN > CC > FF > RR

This is certainly not how I would rank them.  I would do almost the opposite.  I'm not sure whether FF or NN is better and I'm not sure if CC or RR is better, but I am confident that both CC and RR are stronger than both FF and NN.

I've started studying this formally.  I was going to wait until I had completed more testing to get into it, but since the subject is being discussed, I'll explain what I have so far, which is some solid testing of the FF vs. CC match-up.

I started by coming up with a number of different, but balanced, opening positions.  I have 20 different opening positions with FF as white and CC as black and another 20 positions the other way around.  These positions are roughly 8 moves deep into the game.  I have also programmed ChessV with the ability to play a list of games one after the other in "batch mode" and record the results.  I then played each of these 40 different positions 10 different times with slightly different time controls and settings and compiled the results:

CC beats FF: 178
FF beats CC: 157
draw: 65

So it certainly appears that the Clobberers are stronger than the FIDEs (which is what I expected.)  It is possible, of course, that these results are not perfect.  Chess programs can only "see" so deeply and then they must evaluate the position, and they do that with parameters we supply - for example, we tell the program how much the pieces are worth.  There are lots and lots of parameters, and while I believe what I have provided are very reasonble, they are almost certainly not perfect.  One important evaluation parameter for this match-up that we don't know - what should the color-bound bonus/penalties be?  In Chess, having both Bishops is worth half a Pawn.  But the Clobberers have two color-bound piece types.  What if you lose both of the pieces on one square color but still have both on the other?  This should trigger a large penalty, since the opponent can avoid both of those peices by occupying the other color, but how large a penalty?  More testing is needed to continue to refine the accuracy of the evaluation parameters ...

The bottom line is that this result should not be considered 100% conclusive, but the difference is large enough that it is almost certain that the CCs are at least somewhat stronger than the FFs.  I will post all my test positions and results sometime soon, but until I release a new version of ChessV with the batch mode people won't really be able to reproduce.

Now, next question.  If we accept this result, and we believe the armies should be closely balanced, what to do?  Obviously the FIDEs shouldn't be messed with, so the Clobberers would need to be weakened.  My thought is to weaken the Cleric (BD) by making the Dabbabah move a "lame" leap - only allow leaping to the second square if the first square is empty (BnD).  I plan to test that change and see what the results are like.

the Nutters seemed to have not much trouble beating FIDE

Interesting, this is not what I would expect.  I think this is the next match-up I'll start testing.  The challenging part of the testing is computing a number of different but balanced opening positions ...  Stay tuned.

OK, I see. I don't recall exactly anymore where the RR fitted in; it was one of the last armies I implemented in Fairy-Max (because initially it had trouble doing the R4). BTW, I always interpreted the promotion rule in CWdA as that you could only promote to pieces of your own army. This seemed logical to me; promoting to pieces of the opponent army strikes me as unnatural and ugly. But now I believe this is not what Betza originally meant; he was afraid having different promotion rules would cause the Pawns to have different values, which could easily disturb the balance, as you have so many of those.

But I once made an attempt to weaken an army by allowing Pawns to only promote to a Commoner, rather than a Queen-class piece, and it did not seem to affect the strength of the army at all! At first this seemed very strange, but then I realized that in practice you almost never allow a promoted piece to survive: you sacrifice a minor for the Pawn while you still can, or dedicate a minor to prevent it reaching the promotion square. By that reasoning the value of a Pawn is not so much determined by what it promotes to (as long as that is at least a minor), but more by what the opponent can use to prevent the promotion. This would mean that an army where the weakest piece is stronger (compensated by some of its stronger pieces being relatively weak) causes the Pawns of its opponent to be worth more. Having 7 pieces each worth 4.5 (vs FIDE with 4x3 + 2x5 + 9.5) would pose a real problem w.r.t. stopping opponent passers.

Anyway, since Fairy-Max does not support under-promotion, I had to appoint a unique promotion piece, and chose the most-valuable piece of each army. For the Nutters this was the Colonel. But the Colonel has a major shortcoming: it cannot move backwards fast. All native Nutter pieces actually have that problem. So if it comes down to a promotion race, and they can only promote to their own pieces, the Nutters are toast. Even when they promote 2 or 3 moves earlier, there is no way for them to prevent that the opponent will promote as well. Even worse, the freshly obtained Colonel might not even be able to connect with its own King fast enough, and get lost through a fork on King and Colonel. Especially when the opponent can promote to Queen. The Colonel is completely defenseles against slider or night attacks from behind.

Despite this, the Nutters seemed to have not much trouble beating FIDE. The average superiority of there pieces makes that they hardly ever get into an equal Pawn ending.

By NN I meant Nutty Nights. Sorry for the confusion. And I was not thinking about this. By definition the charging knight is a major piece. So is the charging rook, that should be obvious, and along with the colonel this means 3 major pieces. Although the colonel is probably weaker than the ordinary king or than the marshal!

The way I see it and I remember you commenting about this on wikipedia, HG (and us having this discussion a while ago) the order of the armies is NN>CC>FF>RR. But they are close. I like this game for the diversity though. In a private talk Vitya Markov has said that he think the RR are the stronger. I had never made this experiments, though.

I am not sure what you mean by that.

It stands to reason that the Charging Knight has mating potential on 8x8: the Gold General already has that, and the Charging Knight has 4 Knight moves instead of the single Wazir step of the Gold. (After you flip it, which should not matter in an otherwise 8-fold -symmetric context.) So it is bound to be a much stronger piece. I see that in Fairy-Max' implementation of CWdA I valued it as 400 cP (where R=500 and N=325).

Nice data HG!

My trouble is that I was already considering the NN overpowered :(!

There are only 98 positions (out of a total of 64*63*62 = 249984, counting also illegal positions) where King + Charging Knight is not won against a bare King, when the strong side is on move. With the bare King on move, he loses in 80.5% of the positions. In the other 20% of the positions he captures the enemy King or the (unprotected) Charging Knight on his first move, or is stalemated.

It takes at most 33 moves to force the checkmate:

        mated    mate
King captures 50168
mates      36         ( 0.00 sec)
in-1       30     126 ( 0.01 sec)
in-2       90     158 ( 0.01 sec)
in-3      138     446 ( 0.01 sec)
in-4      198     560 ( 0.01 sec)
in-5      334     772 ( 0.01 sec)
in-6      278    1122 ( 0.01 sec)
in-7      498     908 ( 0.01 sec)
in-8      770    1630 ( 0.01 sec)
in-9      808    2246 ( 0.02 sec)
in-10    1240    2274 ( 0.02 sec)
in-11    1720    3124 ( 0.02 sec)
in-12    2312    3978 ( 0.02 sec)
in-13    2606    4922 ( 0.03 sec)
in-14    2930    5294 ( 0.03 sec)
in-15    4002    5400 ( 0.03 sec)
in-16    4432    6778 ( 0.04 sec)
in-17    4966    6770 ( 0.04 sec)
in-18    5072    7006 ( 0.04 sec)
in-19    6334    6988 ( 0.04 sec)
in-20    7678    8402 ( 0.04 sec)
in-21    8512    9134 ( 0.05 sec)
in-22    9074    8836 ( 0.05 sec)
in-23   11468   10968 ( 0.05 sec)
in-24   15336   13132 ( 0.06 sec)
in-25   17800   16642 ( 0.06 sec)
in-26   20122   17610 ( 0.07 sec)
in-27   21332   18210 ( 0.07 sec)
in-28   20308   15816 ( 0.08 sec)
in-29   16108   11550 ( 0.08 sec)
in-30   10430    7332 ( 0.08 sec)
in-31    3470    1386 ( 0.08 sec)
in-32     666     174 ( 0.08 sec)
in-33     124      24 ( 0.09 sec)
in-34       0       0 ( 0.09 sec)
won:     249886 (100.0%)
lost:    201222 ( 80.5%)
avg:       23.7 moves
 

I have seen a game of CWDA where K& Charging Knight has managed to checkmate a lone king. I was first not expecting this but it now seems normal especially if the attacking pieces are "above" the defending king. I'm not sure if it works otherwise. Anyone else knows anything else on that?

On the subject of "...a difference just for the sake of being different, without adding anything new" (H.G), I've poured over various lists of chess variants on this website in search of new games that I might to try out sometime, and many times I've run into arguably just that, e.g. about a half-a-dozen versions of 10x8 Capablanca Chess, same rules for each except for the starting setups being different.

In the case of using CwDA as a kind of mutator, there might at times be an effect that's [essentially] new that is more than the sum of old ideas. For example, if Marsailles Chess works, somehow, when crossed with CwDA, it may well play rather differently than straight Marsailles Chess played using only FIDE armies for both sides. It seems a more problematical matter in the case of a 10x8 version of CwDA, as it's open question, perhaps, whether enough new fairy chess pieces could possibly be created from scratch to make for the novel and bigger armies that might be used.

Also, If, say. an archbishop is not rejected as a tired old piece type, then (kind of as Joe alluded to about rooks & bishops on circular boards) it's value/utility on 10x8 is somewhat different than on, say, 8x8, perhaps moreso depending on the pieces it's mixed with in a given army. I suppose then one could still debate whether anything essentially new is being added - I'd say there was, but instead of being something spectacular, it's subtle/'small', which many/some might find uninspiring though.

P.S.: At the moment I cannot send/receive email.

I'm having computer troubles. Hopefully I can continue on this old machine a bit.

@ H.G.: I suppose the only point to having two like armies on, e.g., 10x8 playing each other, and which aren't already in the context of a previously invented variant like 10x8 Capablanca Chess, would be that the two like armies could be designed to be close in value to, say, Capa's army. Otherwise your point on the matter many posts ago is taken, my oversight due to a hurried post.

I agree that 10x8 would not make sense for Chess with Different Armies. The all-new pieces are already enough of a change.

As for any board-size being better than another, I think that's just a matter of preference. Going smaller than 5x5 might be too small because enemy pawns would be in contact with each other, and the complexity of the game becomes severely diminished. As far as I know, there is no upper bounds for the maximum size of a good board size, and even infinitelly-large boards are easily playable and fun.

True, 10x8 boards have their attractions. Main disadvantage is that they are difficult to come by, as physical rather than virtual entities. Alteratives are Seirawan gating or Musketeer gating (new pieces can appear on a square evacuated by a virgin piece in the same move), or Gustavian boards (just adding two extra squares on each back-rank). I have also seen gating by Pawn pushing (i.e. a piece appearing on the square behind the one evacuated by a virgin Pawn), or dropping on the back rank as a separate turn.

But for Chess with Different armies there is no need to play with armies of 10 (non-Pawn) pieces rather than 8. Most armies consist entirely of exotic pieces already, the whole idea was to do away with all orthodox pieces other than King. So the specific virtue of a 10x8 board would not be used at all. So the question is just whether you want the game to be larger or smaller. And the more pieces each army has, the fewer different armies you can make without reusing the same pieces. So it seems the cons outweigh the pros.

Agree 100%. My only comment is that 10x8 boards (compared to 8x8) have something peculiar: you can add a few variant pieces without taking away any of the classical pieces.

Of course there are other ways to do this: new pieces can be added after the original ones move out, or they can be put in place of pawns, or in front of pawns, or pawns can be moved up to make space for more pieces. But I really like the 10x8 board in favor of these options.

Note that what I like or don't like is just a matter of personal taste. Reasons I don't like FRC are that it offends my sense of symmetry, and that it often leads to start positions from where developing the pieces is awkward and cumbersome. Ease of development is something I appreciate in a Chess variant, and consider a trait of good design.

Orthodox Chess is rather unique by being a very well designed game, and still having a problem, namely that it has been played so much that the opening theory is now so well known that it is too easy to achieve a draw by rote learning. OTOH, opening theory is something most players of Chess-like games do like; prepairing an opening repertoire is a relatively easy way to get better at the game. So I don't think shuffle games are the best answer to the draw-death problem of orthodox Chess.

BTW, I never wanted to claim that new chess variants should not be designed before all existing ones have been played to death. I just see no point in generating 'more of the same' when there still is so much of the same that can be explored by other openings. In order to appeal to me, a Chess variant should provide something essentially new. Shogi is great because of the drops, Xiangqi is great because of the Cannons. Chu Shogi is great because of Lion power, Maka Dai Dai Shogi is great because of contageon. Chess with Different Armies is great because of the asymmetry.

@ Everybody

Well guys, this discussion could hastily become pointless as anyway most people would do what they like. I think the best (but paraphrasing from memory- Fergus if you read this maybe you have a better memory) has been put by Fergus Duniho during my Apothecary creation discussion. He has said something like people will invent variants and the best will come out on top from many points of view like popularity (which is probably most important) or critical acclaim, in a evolutionary manner. But surely there will be always people on the fringe. For example I tend to like 8 stones chess a lot and it is a small popularity game, but still played. Crazier even, I'm playing an Atlantean Ballroom Shatranj against Erik these day which (if I can get my tactics straight) looks at least interesting. A guy/girl has to do what a guy/girl has to do, end of story :)!