Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

A promoted colorbound piece may not be placed on the same color as the promoting player's remaining piece of that specific type.

Can we please remove this rule?  It needlessly complicates the game needlessly IMO.  (Similar to recent discussion on Great Shatranj.)

"Are those now the ‘default’ versions of the Hero and Shaman then?" - Bn Em

Actually, the bent versions were the original design for those 2 pieces. They are made as literally half of the pieces I put in Atlantean Barroom Shatranj, but are about three quarters as effective. At that point I hadn't realized the knight was unnecessary in Lemurian because the hero did the knight's job. I'd put the heroes in the rook's positions and still had the knights in their positions, but they were too weak, and I was kinda stuck. Then the Muse granted me an inspiration.

I am more wargamer than chess enthusiast, and old enough to have been there at the beginning of the wargaming hobby. One thing those early games did was compare themselves to chess, and that idea of military chess stuck in my head for decades before I took a side track by considering the limited or linear (good naming choice!) hero and shaman, and Chieftain shatranj popped into my head. Since I still hadn't gotten Lemurian right, I wrote up and posted Chieftain Chess (it sounds better than Chieftain Shatranj) before Lemurian, thus making the linear versions of hero and shaman appear to have been designed first.

So, yes, courtesy of better naming and actual precedence, the "bent" versions are the default, and the linear versions are the "derived" pieces.

Greg Strong wrote on 2021-04-12 EDT

A promoted colorbound piece may not be placed on the same color as the promoting player's remaining piece of that specific type.

Can we please remove this rule? It needlessly complicates the game needlessly IMO. (Similar to recent discussion on Great Shatranj.)

No problem. While I was looking over the rules yesterday, I saw that and considered removing it, but got called away from the keyboard and never did it.

Thanks, Joe!

The next release of ChessV will have "Bent" removed from the names and the updated promotion rule.

Thank you, Greg!

Belated thanks, HG, for the playable interactive diagram. I appreciate it and it may actually get a few more games of Lemurian played. I still greatly prefer David Paulowich's Opulent Lemurian. When I started designing new shatranj pieces I decided to stick very closely to standard chess formats because the pieces were so very different I felt I couldn't get fancy with the set-ups or the games would never get played. That the FIDE (Modern Shatranj) and Carrera/Capablanca (Great Shatranj) variants actually do get played seems to indicate I was at least partially right. And I would be remiss if I did not thank Christine Bagley-Jones here, because she designed several games right along with me, did her own designs, and put them in Zillions of Games, which got more played. And it was a blast collaborating with her! Collaborations are rare in any sort of artistic design and that collaboration was seamless!