Herichess

It also seemed logical that with nearer twice than once the FIDE number of cells it should be a 4-player variant, and that with such narrow corridors Bishops and Bishop compounds should be Crooked. Then I threw in a Fusion feature - a rex-exclusive version of the single variation of Fergus Duniho's Fusion Chess - in order to reduce congestion when so many pieces are as confined as they are. This involved adding in Princes to give capturable (and in one case Crooked) versions of Fusion Chess' compound royals, in the same manner that Hybrids adds them to the Straight simple pieces of the FIDE array.

My original array gave each player 4 Boyscouts (Crooked Bishops), two on each binding. Eventually I realised that this board bound Knights as well, but that this did not matter because of Fusion. Therefore I decided to have only two Boyscouts aside as well, as their binding did not matter either. At the same time I dropped the array Boyrooks (half-Crooked Queens), which I realised were an unnecessary complication. This is again in keeping with the lack of FIDE Queens in Hybrids.

Since posting this page I have devised a 3d variant based on the same logo, Raumherichess, with Straight Bishops, array Queens, and no Fusion.

Setup

Pieces

	KING: Moves one square orthogonally or diagonally, must be kept out of check.
	ROOK: Moves any distance orthogonally.
	PRINCE: Moves one square orthogonally or diagonally, differs from the King in being capturable.
	BOYSCOUT: Moves any distance alternating between two diagonals.
	KNIGHT: Makes 2:1 leaps.
	PAWN: The familiar divergent front-rank piece. Forward is taken to mean toward the nearest enemy camp.

Rules

A Pawn reaching an enemy blue supersquare is promoted to a Rook, Boyscout, Prince, or Knight.

A piece moving from one red supersquare to another must pass through a blue supersquare and vice versa. A piece moving Knightwise switches supersquare colour as well as cell colour.

FUSION involves moving a Knight, Prince, Bishop, or Rook to a cell already containing a piece of the same army and another of those four kinds. This results in a single more powerful piece. Should this piece be captured, both its components are lost.

FISSION involves using one of the moves available to a compound piece to an empty cell but only moving one component and leaving the other behind. The moving component must be one that could make that move on its own. Thus most moves by a compound piece can have one of two results: the entire compound moves to the destination, or the component whose move is being used reaches the destination and the other remains behind. A Crooked Primate moving one cell diagonally or a Chatelaine moving one cell orthogonally can have three results, as the move is common to both components. Note that a Fusion piece making a capture must remain intact.

A player whose King is en prise to the player about to move is Checkmated and their pieces removed from the game. The Checkmating player then makes their move and play proceeds with the remaining players. The first player Checkmated loses and the player delivering the last Checkmate wins.

Notes

I haven't come up with a satisfactory cell labelling yet. I considered
ABCDEF MN OPQRST
in one dimension and
GHIJKL MN UVWXYZ
in the other so that the two duplicate letters M and N are nowhere used either with the same other letter or in any camp. Any better ideas for notation are welcome.