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Queens (conquer style). A game with 7 queens and no pawns. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Thu, Feb 8 08:10 PM UTC:

Queens without the conquer rule has been played many times on Game Courier and has always come to checkmate or one side has resigned. Queens with the conquer rule will be no different.

You'd be surprised at how much a simple rules change can affect a game. Take Annan Shogi. It adds only one new rule - that if the moving pieces has a friendly piece directly behind it, it moves as that piece instead of itself. This doesn't sound like much, but it changes the game so much that the setup is changed and other rules are relaxed or tweaked to account for it.

While the conquer mechanism is interesting, the perpetual capture problem definitely holds it back a lot in terms of playability. The reason normal Queens works is because the pieces get removed from the game after being captured. Because this is not the case in the conquer version, and the flipped pieces is on the origin square, it is very easy for pieces that move alike to perpetually capture one another, making the conquer mechanism very drawish as it is now.

This mechanism might work with piece rosters with a lot of forward bias (e.g. Shogi), but this idea is untested.