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Compound Courier Custom Chess

This variant has Courier chess as its inspiration but replaces some of the pieces with knight-compounds.

Setup


  White  
   Pawn a3 b3 c3 d3 e3 f3 g3 h3 i3 j3 k3 l3
   Rook b1 k1
   Knight c1 j1
   Bishop d1 i1
   Courier a1 l1
   General e1
   Marshal h1
   King g1
   Queen f1
  Black  
   Pawn a6 b6 c6 d6 e6 f6 g6 h6 i6 j6 k6 l6
   Rook b8 k8
   Knight c8 j8
   Bishop d8 i8
   Courier a8 l8
   General e8
   Marshal h8
   King g8
   Queen f8

Rules

Played like modern FIDE Chess, except:
 * The King may not castle
 * The General is a King+Knight compound
 * The Marshal is a Rook+Knight compound
 * The Courier is a Bishop+Knight compound
 * A Pawn may only move one square and only promote to a Queen
 * A player may win by stalemating the opponent.
 * Another way to win is to capture all the opponent's pieces except the king

Notes

It has been a while since last I posted a chess variant on this site – and this variant seems to me to be quite distinct from my previous efforts which for the most part dealt with board topology rather than piece creation. I have also previously used Courier Chess as the basis for variations with enlarged boards and many pieces. <

This variation uses the medieval 96 cell Courier board and keeps the per-side piece-count to 24. It seems strange to my mind that the increased board size of Courier, when compared with the FIDE board, was populated by mainly short-range pieces. So this variation attempts to rectify this perceived strangeness by replacing the short-range pieces with knight compounds.

In an alternate universe I can easily imagine that the Courier varianat of chess eould become the dominant western variant. To achieve this it would need to have adopted longer range, more powerful pieces; as it had stsrted so to do with the addition of the Courier piece itself. Conpound Courier Custom Chess is my attempt at imagining such an alternate timeline game. One thing I might change is the name -to Alternate Timeline Courier


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By Graeme C Neatham.
Web page created: 2017-03-04. Web page last updated: 2017-03-04