George Duke wrote on Wed, Mar 11, 2015 04:25 PM UTC:
This topic just started is for predator-named chess pieces. They have not
been organized together yet. Daniil and Charles show Tiger will take broad
coverage to include all the ideas. So start with more straightforward Wolf
and Fox instead. (Of course to simple Orthodox players with simple RNBKQP,
Wolf and Fox are sophisticated.) Neither Fox nor Wolf are leapers to any square making them very interesting. Unlike prosaic compound leapers, each is eminently blockable along pathway(s) by intervening pieces.
http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/wolf.html.
Predator Wolf is doubly-bent rider. To the Rook squares it is two-path;
there are two ways to get to Rook squares beyond the adjacent one. Unlike
Sissa (http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/sissa.html), which is also two-path to all Rook squares, Wolf does not reach
Wazir square. Wolf and Sissa have different pathways to the orthogonal
Rook spaces, though both have two routes.
Wolf's other squares seen in Stiles' diagram are single-path. Wolf reaches Alfil square interestingly, that is by omitting its optional middle leg.
Fox reverses the sequence of Wolf, each having three legs with middle optional: http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/fox.html. Fox then is two-path (as multi-path) to Bishop squares but cannot travel there as a conventional Bishop does. Fox reaches Dabbabah square by omitting middle leg, and all its non-radial squares do include middle leg.
Notice the subtle difference that by logical complementary definitions, Fox can reach adjacent squares and Wolf cannot. On piece values, since Fox reaches all the Bishop squares and has two ways to get to each one, Fox is certainly more valuable than Bishop, and factoring in the Dabbabah and oblique squares Fox also reaches, the piece value must be about 6.0. Wolf is also somewhere near 5.5 - 6.5.