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The Pizza Kings. An experimental army for Chess with Different Armies, with lots of calories.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Let's Chess Again wrote on Fri, Sep 26, 2014 01:48 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

This is top bantz

💡📝John Lawson wrote on Wed, Nov 10, 2010 05:08 AM UTC:

I had originally given the Meatball Knight moves in all directions (a more 'well-rounded' move, like a perfect meatball), but it was way too strong, so I had to lame it. This army is a lot of fun to play with, questions of balance aside.

George Duke wrote on Tue, Nov 9, 2010 05:48 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

Pizza Kings is interesting Chess Different Armies force. At first blush Betza's own Nutty Knights and Remarkable Rookies are the best two armies, weighing heavily mere popularity to get a baseline. Betza calls those two evenly matched and well-conceived. Here credit John Lawson's having developed new pieces for the occasion of another 39-point mix. Think of Sausage as all leaps by Narrow Knight, horizontal Wazir, Ferz, or Trebouchet(0,3) at option. The Mushroom Betza already started in 1996 and Lawson adopts. The Pepperoni happens to be forwardly the new CDA Spartan Lieutenant of the comment or two immediately below, turned sideways. Lawson's Meatball is deceptively strong, being of all five atoms, A,F,D,W (which 4-part is Mastodon), plus N the latter forward only. For fun and enterprise, a follow-up comment soon will create a table of features of the 15 to 20 Chess Different Armies from mid-nineties to date. Though Betza started CDA in 1977, aside from just a couple really old ones, it appears the finished Armies in vogue are out of precisely the last 20 years, coincident with CVP itself. Year 2001 Pizza Kings a Cheese Different Armies.

💡📝John Lawson wrote on Sun, May 4, 2008 04:31 AM UTC:

BTW, there were some older comments on this game, including an 'excellent' rating from Ralph Betza himself.
http://www.chessvariants.org/ratings/-unequal.dir-pizza-kings.html

💡📝John Lawson wrote on Sun, May 4, 2008 04:21 AM UTC:

'It is about 1.25 pawn stronger than a Queen, 1075 on my scale (on 10x8 board).'
It was strong enough to unbalance the army relative to the other 'equal armies'.  Note also that, as a short-range piece, the Meatball would devalue on the larger 10x8 board.
Yes, I know there are other ways to name the piece and describe the move.  Part of the fun of the experimental equal armies vogue in 2001 was an amusing theme, and in those days using Betza's funny notation was routine.
I also invented a Nemoroth variant that could not be published here, since it was based on bodily fluids and secretions.

H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 05:24 PM UTC:

I thought this piece (W+D+A+F+N) was called a Lion, but it seems I was misinformed. I playtested this piece in a Capablanca Chess environment, and it is not that excessively strong. It is about 1.25 pawn stronger than a Queen, 1075 on my scale (on 10x8 board).

George Duke wrote on Sat, May 3, 2008 05:15 PM UTC:

John Lawson in 2001 fashioned a Betza Chess-Different-Armies team with ''Meatball,'' made of all the Betza atoms. N+D+W+A+F. That would be quintuple compound, too many for our humble search of mere triplets. In practice, Lawson says weakening this too-powerful piece was necessary. Hence Narrow Knight move only came about, but full WDFA, or as Jeremy Good points out ''Jumping General/Mastodon + Forward Knight.''(sic, it should be Narrow)