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🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Thu, Jan 13, 2011 11:53 PM UTC:

I'm dubious of including games that replace Pawns with Men. They violate an important principle that I described in my article On Designing Good Chess Variants: 'Pawn structure is the soul of Chess. Do not get rid of Pawns unless you can effectively compensate for their loss.' Men aren't like Pawns. They are major pieces, capable of going in any direction, not just forward. Unlike Pawns, Men can easily surround a player's King in a tight defensive formation, making the game much more drawish than Chess. Unlike Cavaliers, which I replaced Pawns with in some games, Men cannot block each other. So Men are not going to form structures like Pawns, which the other pieces must maneuver around. As described in 'Make offense stronger than defense,' the forward-only movement of Pawns is one of the special features of Chess that make it less drawish than it would be otherwise. Men are not restricted from moving backward, and without the reward of promotion, they have no special incentive for moving forward.


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