Single Comment

How do you define a chess variant? While this may seem to be a somewhat
silly question, it bears directly on this topic. Over several years I
designed a series of games that got farther and farther away from standard
chess variants, starting with Chieftain Chess, a multi-move shatranj
variant (which for reasons of euphony was not called Chieftain Shatranj.)
During this development, the games crossed the line between chess and
wargames, thus managing to turn off both chess variantists and wargamers.
For each, the games were too much like the "other kind". But I think the
series clearly fits into the category of computer-resistant variants. 

The beginning of the series, which I developed and playtested here (thanks,
Nick Wolff and others) were expansions of Chieftain to larger boards and
more pieces, but still very much large shatranj variants with 1 new idea -
that "kings" could be multiple and would control their armies directly,
requiring the "king" to be within a few squares (command range) for a piece
to activate and move. This part of the series I developed with a friend,
and named it the Warlord games, an unfortunate choice, as that name was
already used by a commercial series of games. 

However, this worked well enough that I took the next step to create a true
chess-wargame fusion by adding terrain. In FIDE chess, "terrain" is totally
abstract, and is represented by the difference between dark and light
squares, because some pieces, bishop-types, can only move on one or the
other colored squares. I expanded from white and black to white and grey,
which all pieces can move upon, and brown and green, which restrict certain
pieces from moving onto them. The brown, green, and grey squares are
scattered across a mostly white board, and conceptually represent hills,
trees, and towns. This last part of the series, the "true wargame" part, I
have called the Command and Maneuver series, which is more  description of
the game than it is a name. My developer, Dave, worked on the first few of
these, but then moved away for a job, so I continued on my own.

The best well-playtested game in the series is The Battle of Macysburg.
It's played on a 32x32 board. Players bring 84 pieces on the board in 4
groups of 20 - 22 pieces each, coming in on Turns 1, 5, 15, and 20. There
are 2 times in the game where 1/3 of the captured pieces are brought back
as rallied troops, after turns 12 and 24. With a little care for
positioning of troops and leaders (activators/"little kings"), players can

move all their units each turn, if they so desire. There are 3 levels of
victory, ranging from driving out opponent pieces and occupying Macysburg
to chasing all the opponent's pieces off the board to destruction of the
opponent's army - reducing it to 20 pieces or less. Players may achieve
more than one level of victory, and players may each achieve some level of
victory in the same game. Yet the mechanics are simple chess moves of 1, 2,
or 3 squares for each piece, movement governed by the availability of
leaders within 2 squares of each moving piece as it starts its move. With
no wargamelike rules at all, just the rules mentioned above, the game
reproduces fairly nicely much of the strategy and tactics of Western
European combat around the 17th and 18th centuries. Mechanically, the game
is a chess variant; organizationally it's a wargame. If you consider it a
chess variant, Macysburg is computer-resistant.

This is a review of Macysburg, written by a wargamer and chess, but not
chess variant, player, complete with 2 "snapshots" of the game that give a
reasonable idea of how it looks:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1178742/some-impressions-after-playing-battle-macysburg-sc