Check out Balbo's Chess, our featured variant for October, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

Ajax Chess. All pieces have can play one square in any direction, the Mastodon leaper complements the Knight. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Oct 27 08:13 AM UTC in reply to David Paulowich from 01:16 AM:

Indeed the Ajax Knight is 'potent', as the F move allows it to switch its attack from c1 to a1 in a single move (e.g. Nd3-c2). So it should be able to checkmate in combination with almost any piece.

Note that on 8x8 I never saw much effect of adding moves to a Bishop that lifted the color binding. Giving the Bishops of one player a single orthogonal non-capture step, and the other player that same move on the Knights, did not really swing the score away from 50%. If color binding is a handicap, it seems to manifest itself only for the unpaired piece, making its value less than half of that of the pair. This argues for the Knight gaining more from getting 8 moves than the Bishops gain from 4.

I also did some tests with multiple color-bound pairs (for evaluating the Color-Bound Clobberers CwDA army). The results were best explained by the theory that the intrinsic value of the pieces is half the pair value, but that you have to subtract a fixed penalty if the color bounds are not equally distributed over the two shades.