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Yes, the horses are 'colorbound'; they travel a circuit that only includes 1/3 of the board, like the elephants. Unlike the elephants, the knights not only change pentagon colors while traveling, they form pairs with their diagonally opposite opponent horses, so they are able to be exchanged, whereas only one pair of opposing and exchangeable elephants exists. Note that exchanges between elephants and knights exist and are balanced. The weak pieces, able to visit only limited portions of the board, and not necessarily able to interact with each other, are a feature of the oldest games of chess. Graeme's subtle use of this contributes to the 'large' feel of a small game, and it is not easily noticed. Nice eye. Did you notice it while looking at the 3x5 hex board? The pattern should show up more strongly there. It's easy to miss the boundness, as the knight's move is the easiest to do wrong in a game.
Actually, representation is everything. For example, look at my game 'Square and hex on same board' - http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSsquareandhexon or at this (zzo38) A. Black's comment about 1-dimensional games - http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=25177 But i'm going to post another petagonal variant now, wich is more different from hexagonal variants, each 'square' have 5 orthogonally-adjecent 'squares'.
So this is really (locally) a hexagonal game, since each 'square' has six neighbors; is it different (globally) from a standard hex setup? EDIT: Ah, I missed this discussion a couple years back. I think perhaps the original comment by Gilman answers my question most fully: it's not a 'standard' hex setup. It seems too that the piece movement is not standard for hex games, but I don't see anything that forces us to use the pentagonal layout for ease of visualization. It is neat though how the pentagons have been laid out.
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