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

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Sam Trenholme wrote on Fri, Oct 9, 2009 05:21 PM UTC:
My initial impression of these bifurcation pieces was that they are too complicated. As shown by Muller’s and my own confusion about the pieces, with both of us having years of experience looking at Chess variants, I think these pieces are too complicated to get widely played. And, indeed, I don’t think there have been any games played with these pieces on Game Courier.

What I see with pieces like this is that all of the simple pieces a Chess-like game can have are already invented, and that we’re having to come up with some pretty convoluted moves to come up with new piece types.

The simple Chess pieces seem to be:

It’s possible, of course, to combine leapers and sliders (Can you say “Capablanca Chess”?), but the only combined leapers + sliders in a national game are Shogi’s promoted rooks and bishops. There are also “riders”, sliders whose 1-move “atom” is not to an adjacent square; the knightrider is the most famous piece of this type.

Once we move past these simple pieces, things get complicated and the learning curve goes up. One relatively simple piece is a piece that captures differently than it moves; a piece that, say, moves like a knight or captures like a bishop.

Betza covered the “crooked rook”, “crooked bishop”, and “rose”—sliders which change their direction every square they slide.

Chinese Chess, of course, has the “Cannon”, which has inspired all kinds of pieces that leap before moving or capturing (or a combination thereof). Speaking of leaping pieces, I’m surprised no one has recently discussed having a checker’s king in Chess: A piece that moves like a Ferz, but captures by jumping over an adjacent piece, and can (optionally) capture multiple times in its move. We can, of course, have a wazir (horizontal and vertical) form of this piece, or combine it with any other chess piece.

So, yeah, it looks like pretty much any kind of piece chess can have with a simple move has been discussed here, so we’re moving on to complicated pieces that don’t seem very intuitive to me.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Dimachaer Chess

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.