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Two Large Shatranj Variants. Missing description (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
David Paulowich wrote on Fri, Dec 16, 2005 08:32 PM UTC:
Dabbabahs are frequently called 'war machines' on this site. That would make a good name for the Wazir-Dabbabah combination, which is called 'Machine' in Jean-Louis Cazaux's 14 x 14 variant Gigachess. Here is an old Ralph Betza quote about riders completely lacking the ability to move an odd number of squares:

'The Dabbabahrider moves in (0,2) increments as opposed to the Rook's (0,1) steps. As a piece by itself, it is much weaker than a Knight, the main reason being that it is colorbound times colorbound -- it can visit only one fourth of all squares on the board. The Alfilrider is even worse, and can see only one eighth of all squares. Because of this extreme limitation, we have the interesting case where the AD (Alfil plus Dabbabah) has the same ideal value as the Knight but is much weaker in practice, while the AADD (Alfilrider plus Dabbabahrider) has an ideal value which is unknown but which must be appreciably larger than Knight -- but the practical value of AADD seems to be a bit less than a Knight.'