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Elven Chess. 10x10 variant with 4 new pieces, of which one can double-capture. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Apr 27, 2015 09:47 AM UTC:

My first thought is that your array might be a bit 'top heavy': you introduce many new pieces stronger than Rook, but no new minors. IMO orthodox Chess is such a well-balanced game because the number of piecesdoubles for each next-lower class: 1 Queen, 2 Rooks, 4 minors, 8 Pawns. Give or take a Pawn each piece is worth about twice as much as a piece of the next lower class, so you have many interestng 2-for-1 trades. This gives a much more interesting spectrum of material combination then when only trades within a class occur, because the next-lower class is in short supply and most of the pieces there are already traded against each other before the intrinsically rarer 2-for-1 trading opportunities occur.

For this reason I did not only add Strong pieces (Shishi, RF, BW) to the FIDE array, but also the two Dwarfs (K). That gives one extra Rook-class piece (BW) and two extra Knight-class pieces, to preserve the ratio there, and one piece (RF) halfway between Queen and Rook. So roughly speaking you could say the Q:R:minor:P ratio in Elven Chess is 1.5:3.5:6:10, while in your array (similarly 'splitting up' the RF) it is 2:7:4:10. (The Stag should be worth about a Rook, if the King moves alone are already worth a Knight.)

I would not expect a full-powered Shishi to be any problem in your array, because indeed the Stag is also 'Lion-proof'. It was not clear whether you propose this as a Chess or a Shogi variant (i.e. how the Pawns move, and if there is castling). I once tested an ordinary KNAD on 8x8, and it came out about 1.5 Pawn stronger than Q there. Q would benefit from a bigger board, though (more moves), while KNAD would suffer (longer travel times).