Single Comment

I've been playing a computer version (and playing it against itself) of this for a few years and have determined that the regular side has a huge advantage over the pawn army. Unfortunately the creator of the computer version seems to no longer support the program ('Bag of Unusual Strategy Games') so I cannot experiment on ridiculously high difficulty levels (never mind getting the source to modify it, which would be nifty if I had time). That said, I wonder what would happen if you gave the pawn army the ability to pass, say, a fixed number of times for the game or within a certain number of moves. I don't know what this amount should be, but it seems that the pawn army's 'problem' seems to always that it winds up in zugzwang very early on. The pawn army's advantage is the interlocking defense, and eventually it gets to the point where a capture to open a 'hole' is the only move, whereas the other side is tied down, as one would expect: the strategy is too predictable.