Burden of the royality

The most of inspiration is from Jason D. Wittman's Evolution Chess. Lately I started to thinking about variants with only forward-moving pieces (or at least with forward moves, necessary for some reason) and promotion to royal pieces, but when I stumbled with above mentoided variant, and it has made invention of variant with alike idea more simple. Though, I hope, i'll invent variant I was thinkink about before it, someday... Also note: idea of this game is quite simple, and it's likely if similar variant already exists.

Setup

Actually, it's not that important. Well, consider this setup as "canonical":

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But you may change it. Make board smaller or larger, make empty space between rows of pawns, fill empty rank with more pawns (i'v made it empty to avoid complication with double step rule, but you may chose rules from other variants), or even replace pawns with knights (well, use opening position from Wittman's game, but with two more knights instead of kings). The most important condition - setup must have a lot of pawns or knights.

Rules

As in Evolution Chess, pieces promote after every move: pawns promote to knights, knights promote to bishops, bishops promote to queens, and queens promote to kings... And promotion to king is not good - it makes new goal for opponent! If king is checkmated, it's owner loses. If there are two or more kings on board, one being checkmated is enough to lose. Thus, avoid forking two or more kings!
Of course, one may not move queen into check, because she will turn into king.
Stalemated player loses (to make game less drawish and avoid some little complications in rules).
Capturing all of opponent's pieces (if none has turn into king yet) is also victory, but I don't think it will be happening often.

Two subvariants. They may be combined or not.

1)Use strong Maharajah instead of king - a royal amazon (compound of queen and knight).
Or use some strong piece that can attack piece of same kind without being placed under check: say, with gryphon move.

2)Make promotion cycled! Kings do turn back to pawns. However, kings still can't move into check (but thereafter became none-royal again).
If king moves to last rank, he will become immobile. If pawn moves to last rank, it still promotes to knight only.
Well, to avoid these complication, exclude pawns from cycle, make kings turn into knights.

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By Daniil Frolov.
Web page created: 2013-04-09. Web page last updated: 2013-04-09

Comments

Burden of the royality. Inspired by Evolution Chess. (8x8, Cells: 64)

(zzo38) A. Black wrote on Tue, Apr 23, 2013 02:34 PM EDT:

A third subvariant: Player who win earn points according to how many kings the winner have + 1 (number of kings that the loser have is not relevant), and then add another + 1 if you win by checkmate instead of stale mate. Therefore player with more king earn more points, but only if you win; if you lose, then it is worthless. You can then also allow kings castling with any rooks horizontal/vertically away (even disregarding the other FIDE rules of castling), which does not changes the pieces; this might be a useful move in a few cases.

Rodrigo Zanotelli wrote on Wed, Apr 17, 2013 10:01 AM EDT:

"2)Make promotion cycled! Kings do turn back to pawns. However, kings still
can't move into check (but thereafter became none-royal again)."
In theory the king should be allowed to move at check with this rule (but can't stay into check).
The idea of check is to make impossible to some player make some mistake move that will end the game.
If the king will turn into a non royal piece, then by making the moving and puting this non royal piece into check, he will not end the game and lose by a mistake.