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Herd. Experimental variant with jumping pieces on 7 by 7 board. (7x7, Cells: 49) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Charles Gilman wrote on Fri, Mar 21, 2003 05:25 PM UTC:There is a problem with the camels. These pieces are colourbound, and your array puts them all on the same colour. You could swap them with another piece on one side of the king only, giving an asymmetric array, or use a standard board and have an extra piece between the king and one of the bison. Other leapers include Wildebeest (Knight+Camel), Zebra (2:3), and Giraffe (1:4).
Charles Gilman wrote on Sun, Jul 6, 2003 08:40 AM UTC:An interesting way to develop this game would be to follow the 2 elemental 1 compound rule of many of the most elegant games. Standard modern Chess has 2 Rooks, 2 Bishops, and 1 compound of them. Carrera's game extends this by adding 1 compound each of Rook+Knight and Bishop+Knight. Wildebeest Chess adds to the standard pieces 2 Camels and a Knight+Camel compound (the eponymous Wildebeest or its zoological synonym Gnu). For a game dominated by oblique leapers a good array would be a Carrera-like 10-file one with Knights on files a/j, Camels on b/i, Zebra c/h, and 1 each of the three compounds and King between them. Camel+Zebra is the Bison that you already have, and Knight+Zebra is apparently termed Gazelle.
Charles Gilman wrote on Thu, Jul 10, 2003 04:49 PM UTC:A small correction to my previous comment. A 'Carrera-like' array would not have all the compounds in the middle ranks. Carrera was the first man to introduce a variant with all three compounds of standard elementals, but I had in mind later versions with (to my æsthetics) better arrays. These include Bird's Chess and the first two variants shown on the Capablanca's Chess page.
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