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On Designing Good Chess Variants. Design goals and design principles for creating Chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Jan 31, 2011 10:42 AM UTC:

This is one of the reasons I liked Spartan Chess so much: the Spartan army implements this orthogonal / diagonal symmetry to a very large extent:

* There are both orthogonal and diagonal step 1 + jump 2 pieces (2 of each).
* There is a single orthogonal and a single diagonal slider, with some extra leaper moves.
* The King does both orthogonal and diagonal single steps.

In the original design the extra moves on the sliders were always Knight moves. The better-balanced version changed that to having R+K in stead of R+N, which reduces the symmetry a little. But I think it improves the game, as the R+N actually is a bit of an awkward piece.