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Knavish Chess. Variant using square-board analogues to 6-way hex-board Dabbabas. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Jörg Knappen wrote on Mon, Jun 6, 2011 09:07 AM UTC:Good ★★★★

First, an excellent to the 2 new pieces, the knave and debtor. The two are nice findings and worth the consideration of other chess variant authors as well.

It is not an excellent for the whole game, because I think board design, piece mix and rule setup don't work as well as they could. For most pieces, 10x10 is already a too large board making them slow. The standard chess bishop and queen aren't good counterparts to knave and debtor. The standard chess rules on stalemate also don't accomodate knaves and debtors well: How many of them do you need to force the checkmate of a lone king?

Knave and debtor have a strong 'shatranjian' feel; probably a very good variant is taking standard shatranj and replacing the knights with knaves and the alfils with debtors. Note that the original shatranj has only 2 alfils (where 8 are needed to cover the whole board); in the same manner shatranj with knaves and debtors has only two of each species. In shatranj, stalemate and lone king are wins, which reduces the number of draws.