Wild Rose Chess
The idea that came to me at the beginning of this year may seem somewhat strange and unusual to you, but I assure you that it is more than valid and fruitful. And this time, friends, I hope you will be able to appreciate not only the beauty of this chess variant, but also catch the scent of those beautiful Wild Roses, from The Gardens of Yin or other visions that were revealed to me in January...
Setup
Pieces
Dealing with images of standard chess pieces and standard notation, we have:
Wild Rose (Queen) - this piece combines the functions of the Queen and the King: it can move and capture like a Queen, it cannot be captured, but it can be declared check or checkmate like a regular King in chess.
Pawn is an ordinary pawn from standard chess that moves and captures according to FIDE rules.
Nightrider (Knight) is a fairy chess piece by Thomas Dawson. It can make a move like a Knight, but then can continue to move in the same direction. Thus, it can make one or more successive Knight-leaps, all in the same direction: the spaces visited by all but the last jump must be empty.
Crusader (Bishop) is a combined Bishop and Dabbabarider (jumps two squares orthogonally, leaping over any intermediate piece with continuation of movement in a given direction).
Raven (Rook) is a combined Rook and Nightrider.
The initial arrangement of the pieces is shown in the picture above.
Raven is in the rook position, Nightrider is in the knight position, Crusader is in the bishop position, and Wild Rose is in the queen and king positions. Pawns, as in classical chess, are located along the second and seventh ranks.
Rules
White starts the game.
Players' roses can declare mutual check and even checkmate to each other!
Avoiding check is not necessary, but it does affect on >>>
Win/Loss Conditions
After your move:
- By giving check to two of your opponent's Wild Roses at the same time, you win the game (checkmate)
- If two of your Wild Roses are in check (under attack), you win the game (blossom roses)
- Leaving your opponent without pieces (only with Wild Roses) - you win the game (fading roses)
- Leaving one of your Wild Roses under attack means you lose the game (rose cutting)
Winning Conditions always prevail over the only Losing Condition. Or in other words, the first one to fulfill one of the three winning conditions wins.
No castling. Yes en passant.
Repeating a position is prohibited and is considered an illegal move.
Pawn Promotion is very different from the usual option accepted both in standard chess and in countless variants of chess and is called Growing Roses.
Growing Roses
A pawn that reaches the last row is removed from the board, turning any opponent's piece into a Wild Rose. Thus, the opponent has another Wild Rose.
The player who brings his pawn to the last rank himself decides which of the opponent’s pieces will become the Wild Rose and makes a move again!
In other words, a 'pawn promotion' looks like this (step by step):
- The player moves his pawn to the last rank.
- The pawn is removed from the board and no longer participates in the game.
- The player, at his discretion, replaces any opponent’s piece with a Wild Rose of the same color.
- The player makes another move with any of his pieces (if at the same time one more pawn can reach the last rank, then the whole procedure is repeated again).
- The move to 'promote' the pawn is over.
- Now it's the opponent's turn.
Notes
Such an unusual concept of the game poses completely new and unique challenges for us, confronting us with tasks that we have never encountered before in chess and chess variants. Perhaps the idea of Wild Roses would be even stronger on boards of much larger sizes, say 12x12 or 16x16, but that, as they say, is a completely different story...
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By Вадря Покштя.
Last revised by Вадря Покштя.
Web page created: 2024-02-09. Web page last updated: 2024-02-25