Single Comment

You have entertained me very much with your variant. I was almost certain it was flawed upon my first reading of the rules, but upon thinking really hard and thinking up a lot of possible situations in which I would expect the game to collapse, I have found only two problems with it, and they are both a matter of personal taste, rather than serious flaws. The first is the alfil, which is twice colorbound. The alfil will never be able to move onto columns A,C,E,G and I, and will never be on a black square. There is also the problem that the spaces that an Alfil can move to before he chooses to move to his 'additional square' for the first time, can never be moved to again for the remainder of the game after it has made such a move. In order to have things well balanced, each player would really need FOUR Alfils, as opposed to one, in order to cover the whole board. Although I guess it might not seem like a problem to some, I find this rather disconcerting. The second is the opening: The tank, which begins the game outside of the central array, wrecks havoc on the openning, which could be extremely interesting if it was primarily composed of interactions between infantry units. A piece as powerful as the tank being thrown in the middle there seems to screw things up. Also, since the alfil, the assassin, and the knight are all jumping pieces, these pieces also interfere with the beautiful and pure sort of openning that the infantry units could produce.