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Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
12. Thunder. This is the best I could figure out from the Thunderer in Charles Gilman's Man and Beast articles, which is listed as a square-board piece even though one of the pieces that combine for it (the Tradewind) is one of his cubic/hex-prism pieces. I'm mainly guessing at his intent here, but I do find it interesting.
The Thunder, to start with, has all the moves of the Queen and Nightrider. It also can leap two spaces orthogonally or diagonally, and then may turn 45 degrees to move outward like a Bishop or Rook (respectively).
This is an extraordinarily powerful piece; see how it utterly dominates even this 15x15 board? Only the threat of capture can restrain it once it's in the field.
One way to restrain it would be to make it a promotion-only piece, and given that yesterday's Zip is also called Lightning, it seems like a logical candidate for what it could promote from. (In fact, it was putting up the Zip that led me to do this one today.)
I actually built this originally just as a private joke, and hadn't even intended to put it on Thingiverse until I saw what the move looked like; I put it there more for that than anything else. Despite its being overwhelmingly powerful, the move diagram has an interesting symmetry.
It also occurred to me that one could use this as the starting point for a chess variant with the potential for being truly (ahem) marvelous.