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Man. Moves to any adjacent square, like a King, but not royal.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
V. Reinhart wrote on Sat, Feb 4, 2017 06:40 PM UTC:

Thanks Kevin for the information.

I recently started using Fairy-Max, and did a test to try to confirm HGMuller's information. Using guards on a 10 x 8 board, each test starts with at least 2 knights and 2 bishops for each side, and guards on only one side.

 

asymmetry: [2 guards vs. 2 bishops]
guards win (score) = 40/80 = 50.0%

 

asymmetry: [2 guards vs. 2 knights]
guards win (score) = 46/80 = 57.5%

 

asymmetry: [2 guards vs. 1 bishop and 1 knight]
guards win (score) = 101/200 = 50.5%

 

I think these tests confirm HGM's conclusions. A guard seems to be very nearly equal to a bishop, and slightly superior to a knight. When the game is [3 knights, 3 bishops] vs. [2 knights, 2 bishops, 2 guards] the guards are almost exactly equal to the average of knights and bishops.

 

note: this test started with an unknown value for the guard. By fine-tuning their value, they might be able to play slightly better, so the guards value might be even a little more than summarized here.

 

Btw, here's an updated image of a guard (what I see more often in variant chess games).