Enep
My name is Aurelian Florea, and this is the first chess variant I have published. Its idea came to me by studying Ralph Betza's excellent articles on chess pieces values, as I am to make my own large board variants, but more on this in the near future. For now, I am in the process of making experiments on pieces that have different abilities for moves and captures. While doing this I came across an idea I deemed relevant. Here's how it goes: A knight-wazir is more than 4.5 pawns (as an ideal wazir has 1/2 of the knight moves so worth extra 1.5 points; it is slightly stronger than that as pieces move together). But how strong is a knight that only moves as a wazir when not capturing? Its gain over a knight is less that 1/2 of the knight-wazir's, as the movement power is less important than the capture power. So, its power is at most 3.75 pawns. I name this piece knightwa, for the purpose of this variant (knight + some wazir). This game is named enep (Enhanced kNight Extra Pawn) in English and cîpîp (Cal Înbunătăţit Pion În Plus) in Romanian.Setup
This is the initial experiment but variations will be described below. One player (preferably white, as this side seems a bit weaker after a few experiments) gets two knightwa instead of knights starting on the usual knight squares (b1,g1 for white) where the other player (preferably black) starts with an extra pawn. In the initial experiment, the extra pawn for black starts on d6 as a queen pawn. From my experiment, this setup gives a slight edge to black (he won 4/5 games played by hand).
Pieces
The only piece that is non-conventional is the knightwa, which has the capture power of the knight and the movement power of both the knight and the wazir (one square orthogonally). The rest of the pieces are orthodox.Rules
Except for the extra pawn and the enhanced knight, the rules are those of orthodox chess. The extra pawn cannot go two squares.Notes
I have also tried the following setup once, and white won one game out of one. It is clear that centrality of pawns is crucial. So one way to vary the initial experiment is to move pawns around, as one pawn is on average one point but where it starts makes a big difference.
Another way to vary the experiment is to give different enhancements to the knight. These would be ferz just move, alfil just move or dababbah just move, so knightfe, knightal, knightdab.
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By Aurelian Florea.
Last revised by H. G. Muller.
Web page created: 2016-08-31. Web page last updated: 2023-09-18