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Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Mar 28, 2015 05:06 PM UTC:

Note that the Half-Duck is not color bound, through its (3,0) move, and actually is a major piece, and worth about as much as a Rook.

I once did the same kind of testing as you are doing now, only with Fairy-Max (which also features CwDA as one of its standard games, selectable as 'fairy' from WinBoard's variant selection menu) instead of Zillions, and playing several hundred games between each of the armies. My conclusion was that the Nutty Knights were the strongest, more than 1 Pawn value stronger than FIDE, (which translates to ~75% score) then the Clobberers, which were just a bit better than the Rookies, and then FIDE.

Being color bound hardly hurts, if the pieces come in a pair. Mating potential also only contributes very little to piece value; the Woody Rook has it, but is (slightly) weaker than a Knight over the game as a whole, because of its lower speed, and low forwardness. So the FAD and the DB are really Rook-class pieces, (with 12 move targets, while 8 move targets is already enough to rival the Knight in power), and much easier to develop than the Rook. A pair of them can perform a checkmate similar to the hand-over-hand mating by a pair of Rooks. This more than makes up for the Archbishop being nearly a Pawn weaker than a Queen.

The Nutty Knights deserve their name, as they are really wierd pieces. It surprised me how strong that Charging Knight is. The combination of speed through the fhN moves and concentration of attacks by the King moves seems to be a very productive one.