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Foolish King Chess. Players have different armies and victory conditions. White has a fool for a king. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Sep 25, 2020 11:34 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 10:17 PM:

Ok, thank you.  That is helpful.  Maybe something like:

A Fool may never move to a square that is a kings-move or knights-move away from a King.  (In other words, it cannot move into a position where it would "check" a King.)  Likewise, a King cannot move to a square that is a kings-move or knights-move away from a Fool (as though it would be moving into check, even though Fools can't actually capture.)

I am a bit worried about the promotion rule: can white promote only to Fool, or is this just an extra possibility? The Fool is practically useless as attacker, similar to an Elephant in Xiangqi. That they are uncapturable and that you can have many cannot compensate for this; N times zero is still zero. The possibility for white to win an end-game seems bleak if he can only promote to Fool.

That is a good point... However, I think it is very, very hard to balance unequal armies, even without adding different victory conditions.  So, I think this game is almost certainly unbalanced.  But I think it could still be fun to play.  If you could get the interactive diagram to play a close approximation, that would be awesome.  I'd add that to the page.  But can it really do the free castling rule?  (If not, I think that's ok, I'm not even certain that was the intention.  The page literally just said "castling is free".)