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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.
33. Owl. and 34. Pussycat. These are a couple of pieces I devised on a whim while developing fifth-perimeter leapers, and I rather fell in love with them.
The Owl moves one square orthogonally, or leaps to one of the next four spaces from there diagonally; it becomes a combination of Wazir, Knight, Zebra, Antelope, and (what I call) Klipspringer (4,5): WNZNYZY.
I don't know why it struck me that this combination should be called an Owl. Somehow I just looked at the move diagram, and imagined an owl flying along those lines.
And then I thought about what would go the other way, rotated 45 degrees, and the only thing I could think of was Pussycat (from the old Edward Lear poem The Owl and the Pussy-Cat). This combines the Ferz, Knight, Camel, Giraffe, and Ibis: FNCFXNX.
As with any other fifth-perimeter piece, I generally recommend these only for variants on boards of at least 12x12 (despite my plans for using the Owl in an upcoming 10x10 variant).
They're not perfect (the Owl's neck and the Pussycat's face could use some tweaking, and I'm still debating whether I should put wings down the sides of the Owl), but I'm overall fairly pleased with how these came out.