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@ Bob Greenwade[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Bob Greenwade wrote on Mon, Mar 25, 2024 03:15 PM UTC:

251. Pushmi-Pullyu. I've been contemplating for a good while about how this could be represented on a board, and the recent discussion on its Pieclopedia page gave me some ideas; the only one I actually put into practice is below.

For those unfamiliar with the piece, it's a compound of the Advancer and Withdrawer: it moves (without capturing) like a Queen, but captures by either moving toward its target and stopping one space short, starting next to its target and moving directly away, or both. (mQ[cabK-fQ][cQ-bK][cabK-fcQ-bK])

In this illustration, the White Pushmi-Pullyu can capture the Black Pawn by moving away from it; the Black Bishop by moving toward it and stopping in the space before; or the Black Knight and/or Black Rook by any combination of the two tactics. Of course, it can also move normally in the four unobstructed directions.

The piece is (obviously) named for the creature in Hugh Lofting's Doctor Doolittle stories. While the 1967 movie adaptation starring Rex Harrison famously depicted the creature as being a two-fronted llama, Lofting's original story described it as being a gazelle at one end and a unicorn at the other. Chess diagrams on this site tend to favor the combination of Ram (for the Advancer part of the piece's abilities) and Ox (for the Withdrawer part), and this was the combination I decided to go with for the piece, set on a shaft to make the piece the same height as a Queen.

If requested or recommended, I might also create a double-llama version of this piece, and/or a gazelle/unicorn version, though I think that this should be sufficient.

(I may also decide to remove that potentially fragile ring from the Ox's nose.)