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Falcon Hexagonal Chess. The Falcon into the Hexagonal world. (Cells: 121) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Joe Joyce wrote on Sun, Sep 9, 2007 07:03 PM UTC:
Very nice adaptation of Falcon to hex, Abdul-Rahman. It appears very traditional [if I may use that word for something as new as hex chess], but you obviously did some thinking about the game; you trimmed the 6 corner hexes off the board. [And Graeme's graphic does justice to your game.] Even though I have very little experience in hex chess and have great trouble wrapping my head around the 'diagonal'move in hex games, this one looks like fun to play.

I do have one question about this style of hex setup in general, though, and that's with the pawns. I've never understood why they are set up in two 'V's with the points almost touching and the legs extending away from each other. The distance between facing pawns ranges from 1 to 6 hexes. To me, this destroys the whole pawn skeleton, a major part of chess. Further, this setup exaggerates the values of the center pawns and diminishes those of the flank pawns, as far as I can see.

Has anyone tried the following? The 3 hex board colors can be called Light, Medium, and Dark. The pawns are now set up in an orthogonal line that goes L-M-D-L-M-D... Drop the 3 center pawns back 1 hex each. Move the 2 end pawns on each flank up 1 hex. Now, you've moved 7 pawns per side 1 hex, and the pawn lines are each along two parallel neighboring 'diagonal' lines. The pawns are now set up on an L-D-L-D-L-D... 'wavy' line. This puts all facing pawns either 3 or 4 hexes apart, in an alternating pattern. This gives a more 'chesslike' pattern to the pawn setup, and gives up very, very little, just the possibility of matching an opponent's double step pawn move with one of your own on occasion. Practically, the 1 step reply still results in the pawns blocking each other along the centerline of the board.