Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Daniel is probably not the first to make a large board variant by just doubling the number of pieces. To have a whole cavalry of knights and to have bishops that can protect each other is a very interesting feature. I also like that he 1. didn t double the queen and 2. has the double step of the pawns retained in every position, though forgetting that twice caused me to lose the only game I played untill now.

For my taste there are, maybe, too many rooks on the board. I even would try out to boldly replace two of them with yet another pair of knights. Then the number of each sort of pieces on the board would reversely correspond to their value: 6 knights, 4 bishops, 2 rooks, 1 queen. Could be a stupid idea, though.

Capablanca himself played Double Chess this way in the 1920s:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Chess. Obviously there would be

thousands of ways to arrange and re-arrange this one piece mix
of 64 units..  There could easily be one "Double Chess" for every

resident of  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Nelson_Pillsbury Somerville, Massachusetts USA, Pillsbury's birthplace up to 75,000 now.

But not all such varieties would be equally valuable.

Oh, thank you for the link. Guess it is the first modern chess variant a game score involving a grandmaster{even a worldmaster]is extant.

First, what you're calling flexible castling here is similar to but not identical to what I called flexible castling in Grotesque Chess. I defined it as moving two or more spaces toward the rook with the Rook moving to the space adjacent to the King on the other side. Your description of flexible castling differs from this by allowing the King to also move one space. One problem with this from a programmer's perspective is that the King's movement alone is no longer sufficient to indicate whether a move is a castling move. If a King moves one space to the side, it might be a castling move or an ordinary move. Perhaps this could be handled by making castling a Rook move. But no, that won't work either. I suppose the best solution is to handle it as a King move when it is two spaces or more and to handle it as a Rook move when it is one space, in this case moving the Rook to the King's space, which would then automatically shift the King over.

Second, it is unclear whether a King can castle with Rooks in the back rank. You say there are seven castling positions to choose from, which would be true if the King were on the back rank, but on the second rank, where the Rooks are closer to the King, there are only five.

I suppose moving your King destroys your rights to castle, as usual. The King can apparently end on the square occupied by the Rook, but not beyond it. Note that in Chess960 the Rook is also not considered an obstacle for the King move. I guess the designer did not like the King moving to the edge because that would make the Rook stationary. He also does not allow castlings where the King would remain stationary. (In Chess960 both of these can occur.)

Now that you mention it, the rules do specify that the King can move to the Rook's space when castling. I missed it, because I wasn't expecting this kind of departure from the rules of Chess. It can be programmed by recognizing an intention to castle when either the King or Rook makes part of a castling move that would otherwise be illegal. This would be if the King moves two or more spaces, including to the Rook's location, or if the Rook moves to the King's location.

A big board game where the inventor doubles-down on the 6 chess piece types, but the fast pawns rule adds an interesting twist to speed things up a bit.