Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Having thought about these pieces I can identify four (relatively) simple long-range pieces of which yours are compounds: (1) Maorider, starting on a Wazir step and ending on a Ferz one; (2) Moarider, the other way round; (3) Waverer, starting AND ending on Wazir steps; (4) Feverer, starting AND ending on Ferz steps. The first two long-range pieces on this page are (1)+(3), starting on a Wazir step and ending on either, and (2)+(4), starting on a Ferz step and ending on either. The third combines of all four. Other possible compounds are (1)+(2), the Moorider; (1)+(4), the Reverse Rhino, starting on either step and ending on a Wazir step; (2)+(3), the Reverse Mirror Rhino, starting on either step and ending on a Ferz step; and (3)+(4), the Unhorser, starting on either step and ending on the same.

As if to reinforce to the biological link with horses, the letters of HORSE and SHIRE (a breed of heavy horse) are subsets of the letters of RHINOCEROS (others are HORN, HORNIER, HORNS, NOSE, NOSIER, the centaur CHIRON, the Knight-based piece ROSE, the multi-horsepower IRON HORSE, and HERO and HEROIC for being which knighthood is often awarded). Alas HORROR (tying in with Monster) requires an extra R. All ten letters can be rearranged as HORSEICORN, which isn't a real word but does seem to fit the biology!

Looking at the Monster's move pattern makes me wonder how to aesthetically fill in those last eight squares for a piece that can cover the whole board, when empty. The best opportunity is in bent riders, a simple Monster-Unicorn (The Horny Monster!) manages it, but it doesn't really preserve the flavor of 'too many combos' and 'no jumps', so maybe a Monster+Gryphon+Aanca, and since the Monster is a combination of a combo-rider with a combo-rhino, adding on a combo-bent-rider, which are themselfs combinations of rhinos and riders, makes sick, sadistic sense. This is also a Double-Rhino Combine, which sounds like something John Deere on Steroids would sell. Anyone crazy enough to value it? A Combine is 2 queens, the double-rhino is somewhere between less than a queen and more than a queen, but surely 3 queens is too trite an answer... on the one hand, there are even *more* overlapping paths, but on the other, overlapping paths make any given square harder to interdict, if that happens to be your goal. <p>They could add this piece to the top end of the 'RPG'/promoting variants. In which case, it'll prolly end up being called the Tarrasque.