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When I first designed this game, I thought a direct translation of the Knight's capturing move would be too weak, since pieces on the squares adjacent to ring squares couldn't be captured 1/2 the time, which was not true for any other piece. Since I wanted to avoid the edges being areas of safety, I defined a Knight that could capture pieces on the edge of the 8x8 center, unless blocked. Now, thinking about it, maybe I'll add the 'pure' Knight's move as a variant.
Two further variants occur to me. One is to have Nightriders instead of Knights, so that my preferred capture would be more in accord with the normal move of that piece. Another is to allow a capture of any number of pieces in a straight line, though not necessarily adjacent, like a Queen in French Draughts.
The Nightrider variant occured to me, too. In fact, I have a version of the ZRF that I'll post one of these days with both the modified Knight and the Nightrider. Multiple captures, while certainly possible, has the effect of increasing the relative power of the runner pieces vs the non-runners, which violates my attempt to keep some Chess-like character to the game.
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One thing about the Nightriders. If you have leaping Nighriders starting in the usual spot for Knights, the King's and Queen's Pawns are attacked on turn one, which is bad. The ZRF pushes the King's and Queen's Pawn forward a square to avoid this problem (they get no double-move from there).
You must think well the initial setup if you use nightriders. The piece may add intensity to the game, but you must evaluate if idiosincracy of the game is lost with this piece, Jumping Chess is very near FIDE CHESS, with it´s own particularities, but the idea seems to be not too far from FIDE CHESS. The game is beautiful AS IS, but all idea that can add interest to the game should be considered and WELL evaluated (you can play-test the changes and alternative setups using Zillions. As you must have noted, Zillions plays Jumping Chess with a good level of play.
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