Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

In terms of the Man and Beast series of piece articles the pieces are a General, Rook, Rookranker, Rookfiler, Sennight, and row of Migrants. As the orientation in Glinsky/McCooey it is the Rookranker that is bound to its file and the Rookfiler unbound - in the Wellisch orientation the Rookranker would be unbound and the Rookfiler bound to its file. The Migrant was invented by Glinsky for his game, and use of the Rookranker and Rookfiler may well be based on this piece. Certainly the Migrant's noncapturing move is one step in the Rookranker's most forward direction and its capturing move one step in the Rookfiler's most forward directions - exactly as the Pawn's moves are as regards the Rook and Bishop.

I am hesitant to criticise a variant by one of the Polgar family, but a talent for playing on square-cell boards does not necessarily imply one for designing games for hex ones. This does look very muvch like a game by someone who has not made a great study of hex variants, as it addresses several issues of the hex board less well than variants on these pages do.

A severely bound Rookranker is really a very poor analogue to the Rook. A better piece to complement the Rookfiler here (or the Rookranker in the Wellisch orientation) would be the Moorhen - a hex piece moving straight forward/backward/left/right regardless of which two are orthogonal and which hex-diagonal. This is bound to alternate files here and alternate ranks on Wellisch boards. However it would then be logical for the Queen analogue to also include the straight sideways directions. As regards subdividing of just Rook directions, my own approach to this in Altorth Hex Chess avoided severe bindings and was also Migrant-based.

It is also odd that Migrants line up with their own edge of the board rather than - as in Glinsky's game - the far edge to which they are aiming. It would make more sense on a star-shaped board to arrange a row of Pawn analogues with the middle one furthest back rather than further forward, as in my own Flatstar. At first I thought that a 37-cell might be too small for that, but it could be done with six spaces behind to fill, in two blocks of three - rather than a single back row of five. Ther weakest piece would be doubled in number - the Rookfiler in the case of Mr. Polgar's own choice of pieces. The array prior to placing the back pieces would be (excuse the crude colouring):

It is also logical to follow the usual convention for small variants and dispense with the double-step move.

Since my last post on this thread I have devised a name for the compound of the Moorhen and the G/McC Rookfiler or Wellisch Rookranker - Superrook - and added it to my article Man and Beast 12: Alternative Fronts. I also have a Superunicorn - Moorhen plus either G/McC Unicoranker or Wellisch Unicofiler. Unlike the ordinary Unicorn or the Moorhen it is unbound.