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Thanks for the comment, John. [And I appreciate the game. We certainly have different styles, don't we?] This fits in nicely with what George and I are talking about in the Modern Shatranj comments. And I promise to be brief. ;-)

At the risk of being somewhat immodest, I rate my handful of shatranj variants as individually good to very [very] good. Others may differ. What I think is excellent is the progression from game to game, playing variations on the same theme to build a range of individual games that are each an exposition of one step in the evolution of shatranj in that parallel universe where they don't play FIDE. 

And you've got it, George. Just as the 'Shatranj to FIDE in 6 steps' comment in MS is a somewhat arbitrary ladder of my own devising, so too is the progression from historic Shatranj through my variants a somewhat crooked ladder that eventually leads to Chieftain and elsewhere stranger, and is no longer shatranj in any real sense, though it often uses similar pieces.

Still amazing is that Modern, Great, and even Grand Shatranj were not done long ago by someone else. They were obvious games, just lying there on the ground waiting to be picked up by anybody who wandered by that spot. Apparently I was the lucky one who looked there first, but others could have. And now Maorider has popped up, another game getting initial rave reviews, as just one example of many. Makes you wonder how many good games there out there in the dark, just waiting for us to stumble over them.