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Jörg, I very much enjoy the game and exploring these pieces. You are a very good variant designer and thinker about chess variant fairy pieces.

I also like Quinquereme and I'm very excited one day to try experimenting with your CwDA army, Sai Squad (as well as your other CwDA armies). 

I am trying to get an idea for an estimate of the strength of these Nachtmahr pieces - I believe the Rose is strongest, maybe followed (in order of strength) by straight wide crooked nightrider, quintessence, regular nightrider, diagonal wide crooked nightrider and diagonal narrow crooked nightrider. Any thoughts? Maybe after more experience, I will have a better theory - these are just vague guesses.

How might the Nachtmahr army fare against FIDE? It's commonly thought that a normal nightrider is worth as much as a rook on an 8 x 8 board. I suppose the Nachtmahr army would handily defeat the FIDE army...

/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DNachtmahr+vs.+FIDE%26settings%3Djudgmentality

If you please, what are the names for pieces other than rose, nightrider (qua nightrider) and quintessence? In your notes, you mention a French and German name but you don't say which piece specifically these names apply to...

Also, Carlos and I are having a bit of discussion about the Quinquereme - he created a nice diagram which you can see here: 

http://www.chessvariants.org/index/listkibbitz.php

I have ideas about some other nightriders one might develop for fun and a sort of game design for a Nachtmahr 2 (which I might call something more akin to "a dream") introducing some of these other nightriders.


Please email me if you're interested in discussing or as a courtesy, I shall email you when I've come up with an actual variant. It too will be a "study game" but maybe playable as well...certainly I am having fun playing Nachtmahr right now and it's, at the very least, helping me to become more familiar with how these pieces move.

We can get a first approach to the relative strength of these nightriders by placing them on the central square (g7) of a 13x13 board and counting the number of squares affected/checked from there.

Doing it, we would find these results:

Hence, the following equivalences should be near to be true:

NN11 = NN00 + NN33 = NN00 + NN21 = NN31 + NN04 = NN02 + NN04

There are reams more nightriders mostly unutilized than the ordinary hack one developed by Dawson a century ago. So far they remain in problems and thought experiments.  Classic essay here proposes Straight Wide Crooked, Diagonal Narrow Crooked, Diagonal Wide Crooked, and Straight Narrow Crooked.  Best of all, the essential nightrider Quintessence.  Each one makes better more interesting play than Betzan-tagged 'NN'.  Play of that ordinary Dawson nightrider is inferior because it just duplicates successive Knight moves same direction.  It is no more interesting than "limited" pieces like an up-to-three-step Bishop or Chess Different Armies Short Rook.

Quintessence itself gets play in odd-shaped 84-square Quintessential Chess, adding also  Leeloo compound R + Quintessence.  

Quinquereme takes it up to 12x12 with the same Quintessence.  Each of the various nightriders in combinations, one and two of each together with some of the other 6 or 8 piece-types in the set, on different board sizes can create thousands, well millions easily, of individualized CVs.  Worth exploring in the abstract are the standard boards 9x9, 9x10, 10x10, 10x12, 12x12, 10x16.  All the large sizes should have a variant nightrider species for improved implementations. Even rudimentary Dawson NN of such wide appearance is superior to also-overused Carreran BN and RN, four hundred years beat to death.