Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I'd note High Priestess is used for a different piece type than BNW, in a number of CVs invented years ago by Joe Joyce that are still played on Game Courier now and then.

For BNW some years ago I thought up 'Freemason' (made it to wiki on Fairy Pieces, somehow). Historically the name could arguably be extended back to masonry. Freemasonry also includes a religious element to it, a Google search revealed. Main reason I picked the name was that it begins with 'F', which no other piece type in my Sac Chess CV started with. [edit: I picked 'Ship' for RNF since RF I called Sailor, and I'd use 'H' as its initial]. However a drawback is that Ship is used for many piece types/CVs, I later learned.

Somewhere in CVP's Man and Beast piece articles Charles Gilman long ago offered different names for BNW and RNF types than any mentioned in this thread. I like the name that Very Heavy Chess uses for RNF.

There are a few problems with the name Popess:

1. Unless you're counting Pope Joan, there has been no such thing.
2. Presumably, there would be only one Popess if there were one, because it would be a female Pope, but your game gives each player two of them.
3. The word derives from a word meaning father. Presumably, the word for a female equivalent of a Pope should derive from a word for mother.

Here are some possible alternatives:

• Mother Superior - the highest rank reached by nuns in the Catholic Church.
• High Priestess - a common term for a high ranking female cleric, and it is used in the major arcana of the Tarot.
• Bokononess - a made-up word formed from the name of a fictional religion portrayed in Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle.

I have abandoned the name of Templar for the BKN, because Templar is used in other variants with other moves. I have adopted Popess which seems unused (although I wouldn't be surprised to be wrong).

For fun, Bikini would have been a possible alternative too.

I (a Canadian) was born on a NATO/Canadian air force base near Metz in France, so maybe it's the French air or something. :) Francis Fahys, also French, knows well that area in Northeast France; he hasn't logged onto this CVP website for a few months though (he seems to only play CVs on Game Courier, on this site).

I think we are a bit attracted by the same concepts. Very Heavy Chess is maybe really too much and at the end boring. First tries I made with ZoG didn't show that but time will tell. Using compounds of FIDE pieces is also a direction I had in mind for my family of CV beyond Metamachy and Zanzibar.

Interesting CV concept. I'd been thinking for a while now of making a somewhat similar CV (same piece types used) but for on a 12x12 board, with pawns moving up to 3 steps initially, but I was a bit afraid the pieces of each army might not come into substantial contact soon enough with 6 ranks in between the armies at the start, unlike in Very Heavy Chess.

Very Heavy Chess is ready

Published.

Very Heavy Chess is ready