💡📝Joe Joyce wrote on Sat, Dec 27, 2008 07:38 PM UTC:
John, thank you for the comment. Actually, the jumping general makes it into Grand Shatranj, but not this game. However, there is no reason you could not replace the sliding general with the jumping general in this game. The two reasons that did not happen are: first, that this game was sort of independently and sort of communally designed by 3 people, all of whom came to the same piece*; and second, in considering the game as I wrote up the game page, I felt the jumping aspect made the piece far too overpowered for a shatranj game that was otherwise so close to the original in pieces and concept. Still, all my presets are non-rules-checking, so one can swap pieces easily.
*I suspect the reason we all used this piece was that we were looking at moving shatranj toward chess in a series of 'shortest steps' from one to the other, and neither the modern queen nor the ancient ferz jump.