Comments by JorgKnappen
Nice game with the obvious traces of play-testing. It is not explicitly stated in the description: I assume, the game ends when the King is checkmated on the top board, i.e., a King cannot be "buried"?
It seems that the Chess Variant you are thinking of has been invented before, see http://www.chessvariants.org/diffmove.dir/amazone.html on this site.
Bugs in implementation? I played this game against the computer using Firefox under Linux and I found the following strange behavious: 1. Sometimes, the computer moved its King to the centre of the board and the game ended. I see reasons for the computer to resign in the concrete situation (and it does not resign in really lost postions). I noticed that castling was a promising move for the computer. 2. When I get a pawn through to promotion, I cannot choose a piece to promote it to. I get a white band over the middle files of the boards, but cannot click on anything. There is a (x) mark, but it does not close the white band either.
An excellent for the great rewrite.
Interesting game and worth trying out.
I also love your pieces, specially the Werewolf and the Unicorn that are new to me.
Here are a few remarks:
The "jumping rook" and "jumping bishop" pieces are known as "ski rook" and "ski bishop" (think of ski jumping!) for a long time, for a reference see, e.g., here: http://www.mayhematics.com/q/mccs.htm
Since your Chess Variant is a themed or Humans, Elves and Orcs, some artistic freedom in piece nameing is generally granted, But I think you are going overboard in renaming the Human pieces (the standard Chess pieces) only to create unnecessary confusion. Also, the name Phoenix is given traditionally to another piece (WA) and should not be reused. A Centaur is usually understood as a KN compound piece (also known as knighted King or crowned Knight). The piece you name Centaur is usually known as Ferfil (Fearful being a wordplay on that) or as Modern Elephant.
For list of piece names, you may consult these references:
http://www.chessvariants.com/piececlopedia.dir/whos-who-on-8x8.html (My favorite reference list, because you can find a piece when you know its approximate strength)
http://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php?type=Piececlopedia&category=&startswithletter=&language=English&daysyoung=0&daysold=0&minyearinvented=&maxyearinvented=&boardrows=0&boardcols=0&boardlevels=0&boardcells=0&authorid=&inventorid=&orderby=LinkText&usethisheading=Search+Results&displayauthor=on&displayinventor=on®expurl=®explinktext=
(The long link above gives a list of Variant Chess piece article in the piecoclopedia on this site)
And an external link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy_chess_piece
While there are lots of evil creatures (to be associated with the Orcs) in Tolkiens legendarium, the number of good or ambivalent races is rather limited. There are Goblins, Hobgoblins, Uruk-Hai, Trolls, Balrogs, Dragons and Worms, Wargs, and the Nazgul with their (unnamed) flying animals.
For the airforce of the "good ones", there are the Eagles (taking part in the Battle of Five Armies). Than, there are the Ents, and maybe an Ent is a good picture for a rookish piece. Of course you can look up other mythologies for suitable names.
Another close (but not exact) match is the Eohippos (German Urpferdchen) from 10 directional chess (see http://www.chessvariants.com/contests/10/10_directional.html ). It moves and captures the same way, not in a pawnish style.
The Knight-Fers compound (NF) is also often seen under many different names, my favourite name is Dullahan (a male counterpart to a Banshee, featured under this name in the "Fearful Fairies" http://www.chessvariants.com/invention/fearful-fairies – other names include "prince" (problemist usage) or "Priest" (Scirocco, http://www.chessvariants.com/invention/scirocco )).
The Squire Knight is a definitely a Rook-class piece with 4 new capturing moves and 2 new non-capturing moves. Experience shows that additional capturing moves are worth more than additional non-capturing moves. The Squire Knight has 12 targets to aim at ... quite impressive.
I am pretty sure that Squire Knight makes an enjoyable and easy-to-learn chess variant.
Thanks, Chris, for your comments. I finally came back to this game and applied the fix you suggested to the initial area, naming it "Move zero" rule.
An interesting and very playable game. The figures are divergent pieces moving as the nominal piece and capturing as Querquisites.
It is great to see a Zillions file for this game. The graphics are well done, specially the symbols for the Knaves and Debtors.
In fact, I have seen two names for the (2,4) leaper, the two names are lancer (used by G.P. Jelliss) and Hase "hare" used by German problemists. And there is probably at least one name by Charles Gilman for it, maybe two because his nomenclature has changed over time.
The Harvestman goes only in the direction that is strictly incresing the distance from its starting field. I never intended it to take the sidewards turn that increases the breadth of the covered squares from 3 to 5. But I see that one can read the description in such a way that this kind of move were also allowed.
I have definitely heard about this kind of Chess variant, and I remember to have played it in Germany when I was young and not fully introduced to FIDE rules. It is a kind of popular chess variant always flying below the radar, a bit like "Queens Left Chess" with a point-symmetric setup of the pieces. Interestingly, it is the first question in the Rules of Chess: Pawns FAQ on this site.
I found the old Gilman name from 2003 for the (2,4) leaper again, it was Carriage. Already in 2007 he had replaced it, but by an oversight there is still one Carriage left in "Carnival of Animals"
While I think that the inventor of a Chess Variant has the final say in the naming of pieces, I must admit that the choice of Falcon is a very unfortunate one because the Falcon of George Duke's Falcon Chess is vexingly similar to that piece but different.
What about naming it Kestrel (in German Turmfalke instead? This keeps most of the semantic associations but uses a free word (not used for a chess piece yet as far as I know).
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In fact, Charles Gilman has used the name Heroine before for some piece on a hex-prism board (3 dimensional with stacked planes of hexagons). I don't whether it was featured in a game and Gilman's games tend to be deployments of the pieces in many cases.
When you can read German in Fraktur printing, this digitised book shows the variant under the title "Vom vermehrten und vergrößerten Schachspiele, genannt das Spanische":
It gives interesting German translations of the piece names, the Bishop is a "Bickelhering" (a fool in commedy), the Ensign is a Fähnrich, and the Guard is a Trabant.
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Despite the nice geometric move pattern this piece seems to be unemployed before Musketeer Chess. I can understand why: It creates triple forward forks into the rank behind the pawn line and is a very dangerous attacking piece. Creating a playable game with this piece is definitely a challenge (I haven't examined Musketeer Chess in this respect).
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