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H.G.Muller: Do you have any interest in adding support for other pieces besides the Capablanca pieces to Joker80? You seem to have a lot of interest in the Adjutant piece—perhaps you will consider giving Joker80 support for this piece.

The biggest issue I see with giving Joker80 support for this piece is properly evaluating the piece, and having it possible to have the pawn promote to this piece—is there a way we can give Winboard a subset of pieces which we only allow the pawn to promote to?

Given a setup where we have the two rooks in the corners, the king on the F file, two bishops on opposite colors, two Adjutants on opposite colors, two knights, and the queen, we have 216 possible setups.

One issue I have with the Adjutant on a 10x8 board is that there’s a lot of smothered mating threats in the opening. For example, in the RANBQKBNAR array (A = Adjutant), black can threaten Af4# by opening with 1. h4. Black’s only reasonable reply to this is 1. h4 e5; after 1. h4 Ng6 2. h5 Black loses his knight; 1. h4 c5 2. Axb8 Rxb8 and Black can no longer castle on the queenside; 1. h4 g6 2. hxg5 and Black loses a pawn; 1. h4 f5 2. Af4+ and Black loses castling privileges; so that leaves us with 1. h4 e5 2. Nd3 and now Black is probably best doing a Slav-style defense with 2. ... d6, though 2. ... Bxh4 also looks interesting. This Slav-style defense also works against other White threats like 1. h4 e5 2. f4 d6.

When I investigated six different Capablanca setups to see which one was most balanced for White, the one setup with a first-move mating threat scored really poorly; being fifth place out of six (White had a really strong advantage). We can also consider using the RBNAQKANBR array, which doesn’t have any first-move mating threats. Then again, it’s an open question whether RANBQKBNAR is better for white than RBNAQKANBR, or what the most balanced Adjutant array is.