[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]
Rated Comments for a Single Item
Bird's Chess deserves its first comment. After 250 years Carrera's natural compounds (R+N) and (B+N) are moved toward center in initial position for first time by Henry Bird, a chess master. Is the further centralization of Bird's 'Guard'(R,N) in Gothic Chess a slight improvement? I think so. Is Knight centralized to d,e,f,or g also playable? Yes. It's better to cover all Pawns in array when there are so many long-range pieces. Bird fails to do this since c-pawn is not protected, but credit him with playtesting his own inventions. This family of chess has four Knight-capable pieces out of ten in the array.
After some play testing of Bird's chess, I have found that the weak pawn can be defended properly if Black knows how to. While there is a potential fork with the Chancellor on the 2nd turn, black just defends against it by bringing its Knight out to the same file to block and has better development. In real games, White would not try that move anymore. If White brings its knight out on the queen side to attack the weak pawn, black can just advance its Chancellor pawn up 2 spaces and White's threat against the weak pawn has also ended because the pawn cannot be captured with the Chancellor guarding it and if it moves to the other square, it will be captured by the Black queen. Unfortunately, I don't believe the chess playing public every played this game enough to see that it does in fact work despite the weak pawn. I think that if the King-side was reversed with the Queen-side with the King and Archbishop moving to the other side and the Queen and Chancellor also moving to the other side, the Queen would be on its own color and the game looks like a pretty standard chess game. I believe that in order for 10x8 with RN and BN to be popular, the King and Queen need to be centralized and that players just have to be aware of the weaknesses in the game. Speaking of weak pawns, Janus Chess has 2 of them and that game has proven successful. Of course the Janus pawn is not as critical, but there are still weak pawns in that game also. It also has its King and Queen centralized so perhaps we should take note of this.
2 comments displayed
Permalink to the exact comments currently displayed.