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Is 144-board the largest size that lends itself to coherent strategy? Turkish Great Chess V at 13x13 being played now at Courier seems to have passed that point. (Jupiter has 16x16.) And there is a photograph of Charles Fort from the 1930s playing on what is clearly a 1000-square board for a joke. Here Quintessence as improved Nightrider establishes with R-N-B all the standard compounds, but 12x12 squares must be upper limit for reasonable play.
Knappen is one of the best variant designers, and his work is a huge inspiration to me. Kudos for an ingenious game with an intriguing type of nightrider that moves as a camel every other move. Here is a curiousity I discovered in a game I just started: If White moves the f pawn on the first move, black's unprotected pawn at j10 is threatened by the Pentere, also threatening a nasty double check, which would force the king to flee. j10 is an unprotected pawn. The problem with unprotected pawns in opening positions is not that they make a more inferior game than otherwise for the second player. That's a common misconception. It is simply that variations can be forced, giving the game an immediate tactical edge sometimes not allowing for the flexibility many prefer to have in their opening choices. For a large variant, I don't that's a bad thing. Please note: The forced moves will only happen if one of the players decides it would be of advantage to force them, just as it is optional whether to create the sort of pawn structure which leads to an open or closed game.
This game looks really cool! The only thing cooler would be adding squirrels behind rooks and adding quang trung rooks and shifting the setup one rank forwards so there would still be redeployment space. The squirrels would add more leaping power and the quang trung rooks which capture by leaping over a piece as in checkers but quang trung rooks can only capture one piece in a move. The quang trung rooks could ignore defended pieces and would make the game more interesting. The quang trung rooks would be below zebras. There could also be renn cavaliers below quintesences but that would be wishful thinking
That is a tolerable self-assessment about Gross, Fergus. I do not like it because as in most Duniho's there is nothing new, no novel piece-type nor rules mechanism. Uncreative. However, the modus operandi often works, purely new combinations of existing elements, such as in throwing all the neat stuff into Eurasian Chess. Presto, something pretty good, once in a while the whole being greater than the parts by, hey, what, synergy, synergistic. Here is a 12x12 that has really unique piece carried over from the same Knappen's Quintessential, based on new piece-type Quintesssence. Pentere is more powerful compound of Quintessence. Does it compare in value to Amazon? No, it's stronger. The rating upgrades from before. There are about 40 or 50 ''Gross'' (=144-squares) CVs here within our website.
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