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OK, here is an idea that has been bouncing around my head for a couple of weeks: One common complaint about Capablanca/Carrera/whatever chess is that 'There is too much force on the board'. Now, I don't agree with this complaint; I feel the extra force on the board restores the tactical intensity of 19th century romantic era Chess. Indeed, Capablanca chess makes sense since it has the two other pieces the existance of the queen in FIDE Chess implies; it resolves an imbalance that FIDE chess suffers from.

But, for people not comfortable with all of the force on a Capablanca Chess board, the question is this: How do we have a set up pieces that is 'balanced', the same way the Capablanca Chess pieces are balanced? Well, the rook, knight, and bishop make sense, since these three pieces combined cover all 24 squares one or two away from where the piece is located. [1]

So, we need some way of naturally extending the movement of the rook, knight, and bishop that doesn't put quite as much force on the board. My idea is based on ideas from Shogi and a variant available in ChessV called royal court chess.

In royal court chess, there is a piece called a 'crowned knight'. The crowned knight is a non-royal piece with both the moves of the knight and the king. This is a interesting way of improving the knight without making the rules needlessly complicated.

I proposed extending the idea of the 'crowned knight' to the rook and bishop: The 'Crowned Rook', which is a non-royal piece with the move of rook + king; and the 'crowned bishop', which has the combined moves of bishop and king. I'm not quite sure how valuable these three pieces are, but their combined value is considerably less than the combined value of the Archbishop (Knight + Bishop), Chancellor/Marshall (Rook + knight), and Queen. The crowned knight and bishop are probably each worth about a pawn more than a rook, and the crowned rook is probably about 2.5 pawns more valuable than a rook. 19.5 pawns value total; compare this to the 25 pawn value of the three combined pieces in Capablanca chess.

So, the next question is this: What is the ideal starting setup for this 'Crowned Chess' variant? There probably isn't a single ideal opening setup, but I am curious what ideas other editors have for the opening setup.

- Sam

Footnote:

[1] We can take this idea all of the way, and make a variant of Cherry's Capablanca Shantraj where the rook is wazir + dabbah, and the bishop is ferz + alfil, and the queen is the combination of those two pieces. However, Chess variants already have a hard enough time attracting interest without us making the movement of all the non-royal pieces different, making the game even harder to learn.