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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).
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.
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.
There is one thing that seems not quite right in this game: the Knight's capture. Every other piece can capture only the pieces that it would be able to capture in standard Chess. For the King and Pawn this comes at the price of moving twice as far as would otherwise be possible, which is consistent with capturing moves in Draughts. No piece can capture using its shortest possible move: for example there is no question of capturing a piece on a2 or b1 by moving from a1 to b2. It would be better for the Knight's capture to be of a piece a normal Knight's move away by moving to the square a Knight's move beyond that.
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