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Check out Chess with Different Armies, our featured variant for July, 2024.
Check out Chess with Different Armies, our featured variant for July, 2024.
Hi Aurelian
The 3 variant ideas you've diagrammed would already be much more your own ideas than mine IMO, especially as I have almost no experience with the use of off-board gating squares, as you've used, in variants or in making their diagrams/presets. Variants with gating used are IMHO probably closer to still being what H.G. just might call ground-breaking, and/or being more interesting, than e.g. my 12x8 Fairyland Chess idea below. That idea now looks a little more suspect to me because of the potential sweep of the diagonal pieces and possibly that of the frogs too (all in combination with the WADs being concerns, e.g. with them turning out no better at times than using waffles in the setup instead); these might become unnerving eventually from the setup position, as far as perhaps often hindering worry-free castling. In addition, the bishops each having a diagonal leading to an enemy WAD in the setup may at the least not be in good form. [edit: this last point seems not so important at all; e.g. now I recall my somewhat successful 10x8 Frog Chess variant (on Game Courier) has B's diagonals leading to enemy Rs in that game's setup, plus I rate Bs and WADs at almost same value on 12x8. I may still keep looking at this 12x8 variant idea in spite of the other concerns I've also mentioned, as I'm not sure they're really justified.] [edit2: I now have serious doubts about the viability of the Fairyland Chess idea again. See the indicated edits to my original post on that idea, which is found somewhat further below.] [edit3: I thought of a different (and apparently better) setup for Fairyland Chess that seems to work, but it's thus become a clear mutator variant of my Parity Chess variant, IMO; see the comments thread for the Parity Chess preset for more.]
Other than all that, I hope you're making progress with your multi-variant Apothecary (and mysterious Catugo) projects. I have pretty well exhausted variant ideas of my own that I'm currently able to invent and submit (i.e. relatively easy ones), for now. Otherwise, I have a backlog of minor personal projects, e.g. ones relevant to my chess study, not to mention more preparing for the holidays.