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Tandem-Pawn Chess. Pawns are tandems of two pawns, which can move or capture as a unit, or decouple into two pawns. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

💡📝Kenneth Regan wrote on Fri, Jan 4, 2013 05:39 AM UTC:

Thanks for feedback.  To answer George Duke, the main distinction I see from the "modest" and other variants is that mine aims most to lengthen the horizon of planning in the middlegame.  I contributed a comment in the "Future" thread about the influence of the depth of search on the complexity, compared to the branching factor.  

To be sure, I haven't played a game of this to check it out.  Basically I'm doubling down on Philidor's dictum "Pawns are the soul of chess", and figuring that having twice as many souls lessens the influence of soul-less computers :-).

I like "T" for "tandem", though in algebraic one could also capitalize the file of a source square, thus E4 D5 Exd5 Qxd5 for the "tandemized" Scandinavian.  (Note that without the rule that a tandem cannot use just one pawn to take a tandem, ...D5?? would be a blunder.)  For diagrams I would use a pawn printed double with a slight horizontal displacement---for Black you need just the silhouette, while for White you could print one over the other or have one shade the other for some 3D texture.  This should be hackable for existing chess-TeX packages.  

The idea of using checker pieces is also neat, and would work for magnetic sets with button-style pieces.  Another idea is to put a fat ring around the neck of a pawn to make a tandem, though this needs a separate supply of pawns when they decouple.