Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
David Paulowich wrote on Mon, May 7, 2007 01:21 AM UTC:Good ★★★★

Those 10 soldiers may be worth 15 or 16 pawns. This is not a big problem. Dwarves are slow, so slow that I am assigning a '2 pawn penalty' for the extra moves they take to develop in the opening. The 10 other pieces in the Dwarven Army have a total value about 2 pawns less their Grand Chess counterparts. One small adjustment can bring the two armies into line: substitute my War Horse for Peter Hatch's General, dropping the value another 2 pawns. Or you could leave the General unchanged and drop the 'forward ferz move' from the two War Machines. These are the best estimates that I can arrive at without playtesting.

Here is the big problem. Cannons get weaker as the other pieces are traded off. By the time 80 percent of the squares are empty, the Cannon is only half the value of a Rook. On the 10x10 board, this means a Cannon is worth a full Pawn less than a Bishop (which I assign 5/8 of a Rook's value). Even the slow moving Priest is worth about 3/5 of a Rook. Cannons need to face an opposing army with a variety of low-value pieces, that can be used to block the Cannon attacks. See Jean-Louis Cazaux's SHAKO for a successful chess variant design. NOTE: Berolina Pawns would do the job nicely, but they are not under consideration.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Fantasy Grand Chess: Dwarven Army

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.