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I have recently played this variant (or 'upgrade') and found it very interesting. The new peices certainly are different, and the barons proved to be very useful. <p>
Usually when I play standard chess, no pawn ever has a chance of being promoted. However, here the addition of the jester has the ability to skip around other pawns with its diagonal advance (very useful). The jester certainly helped the pawn cause. <p>
When playing, players must be careful <i> never </i> to let their opponent obtain a sorceror, as this peice will very easily be their downfall. I learned this the hard way the first time I played. Mr. Munzlinger said the board needed more mating power, and there is no doubt the sorceror gives it that. <p>
I beleive that Mr. Munzlinger did a very good job of what he wanted to accomplish. The larger board and new peices make for a more interesting and fun game, and I beleive this is one of the better variations (upgrades) out there.
... the variant is called 'Twenty-first Century Chess' and you want to add a note of *Arthurian Legend*?! What's wrong with this picture? :-)
Well,if they can sneak King Arthur onto Babylon 5....
This is, indeed, a very interesting game! I did just notice, however, another game with this name on George Jelliss' A Guide to Variant Chess site. The site indicates that this game was published in Variant Chess in 1991. I don't know if this is a problem or not, but I thought I would point it out.
Please understand, though, that I do not mean to diminish the creativity of this game in any way. The Jester is a particularly good innovation, and helps to diminish the value of opening books in a big way!
To prevent confusion among similarly named games, you might preface it with the developer's surname. For example, when referring to this game it could be called 'Munzlinger's Twenty-First Century Chess'. There are several other games which suffer from this particular condition.
'1ABCLargeCV': This has normal symmetry; no one bothers with east-west symmetry. Dominique Leste's Archbishop Chess last month has exact same initial position, and two of Carrera-Bird-Capablanca's (N+B=Cardinal) were done before year 2000 too(Janus Chess). One Pawn's additional power of forward-only Ferz: any of a hundred other rather innocuous powers might work as well to confound opening theory; no creativity there. Under 'The Play of the Game', do not follow Munzlinger's advice not to castle at a good early opportunity against three strong compounds and two Rooks.
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