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Falcon Chess. Play Falcon Chess on Game Courier![All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Nov 12, 2008 12:07 PM UTC:

This piece is in the Piececlopedia under the name 'Buffalo'.

8x10 = 8 files and 10 ranks, and you start counting ranks at 1? This indeed is a mate in 28, with white to move.

But I don't think you can derive the value of a piece from how long it needs to checkmate a bare King. Indeed, there are pieces that cannot mte  bare King at all, and yet are worth more than a Rook. A Nightrider, for instance. A more obvious case would be a piece that moves like a King, but captures to any square of the color it is on. I am pretty sure this must be worth more than a Queen.

The Bison must be stronger than the Falcon, but I did not develop a etup to play-test it yet. If you start with a conventional array (pawns on 2nd and 7th rank), Bisons make it into a highly tactical position, as they can fork lots of trapped or undefended pieces on the back rank, before you have tme to develop them. Grasshopper play-testing also suffered from this, but after some experimenting, it turned out that starting all Pawns on 3rd and 6th rank was a very good remedy against it. I guess that for Bisons this should work too, but I haven't tried it yet.

My guess would be that the Bison would gain 100-200 centiPawn compared to the Falcon, as the latter is not that easy to block. This would put it at 6-7 pawns.