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Not-Particularly-New Chess. A fairly restrainted variant on a 9x8 board, with Cardinals, Unicorns and Jesters. (9x8, Cells: 72) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
David Paulowich wrote on Sun, Apr 23, 2023 03:06 PM UTC:

I have copied a previous version of the comments page below, with breaks (***) added.

Peter Aronson signs his comments "PBA", Ralph Betza signs his comments "gnohmon" and I forgot to sign on July 5th. 

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Date	    Rating	Comment
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5 Jul 2001	None	Minimal Not-Particularly-New Chess can be turned into Chess with Not-Particularly-Different Armies. Replace the White Queen with an Amazon (Q+N)and the Black Rook on the a-file with a Marshall (R+N). Then switch the Black Queen with the remaining Rook. The setup becomes White: RNBAKCNBR and Black: MNBRKCNBQ, where C=Cardinal (B+N). Pawns promote to R,N,B,A,C,M,Q of the same color. I believe Black has a small material advantage in this game, probably enough to cancel White's advantage of moving first. The rather strange setup of Knights and Bishops goes back to the original version of Chancellor Chess (Ben Foster, 1889). Back in 1999 I invented Paulowich's Amazon Chess on the 8x8 board. See: http://www.chessvariants.com/java/variants/pamazon.html for a Pixelpusher applet.
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25 Jun 2001	None	A new solution to the unguarded Pawn has been added as a subvariant, where the Unicorn's leap is considered one step diagonally, followed by one step orthogonally outward, and opposing pieces on the diagonal portion are captured, while friendly ones are leapt over. This is perhaps a bit hokey, but gets the job done. This Guarding Unicorns subvariant has been added to the ZRF, along with a Designer's Choice subvariant combining the Guarding Unicorns and the King's Pawn is a Berolina Pawn subvariants.
PBA
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4 Jun 2001	None	
Is sticking the NB on the end of the Paulowich lineup too concentrating? It could be, I guess. It means that as soon as you develop those pieces, that end of your array will be naked.
Yes, I got to like the idea of the Berolina P in the middle of the 9-wide board more and more as I thought about it after posting. It should work for all odd-numbered widths.
--
gnohmon
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1 Jun 2001	None	No Mad Elephants in this game, this is supposed to be a restrained variant. Really. Well, mostly. But don't worry, there are lots of Elephants in a project in progress.
I'm not sure about the Minimal NPN Paulowich Chess array -- is putting the Queen and Cardinal/Archbishop right next to each other in the corner kind of concentrating the heavy pieces a bit?
Making the center Pawn a Berolina Pawn . . . Hm. That's an interesting idea. I think I'll add it as a subvariant, and to the ZRF and play around with it a bit.
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1 Jun 2001	Good	
and add an Archbishop at the right, oops.
--
gnohmon
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1 Jun 2001	Good	
I like the use of the Jester, whose niftiness was the redeeming grace for the poor guy who got so roundly blasted for his tone.
Of course, the Jester could be some other piece (an alfil which can become an angry pachyderm?)
If you start with the Paulowich lineup (CNBRKBNCQ) (C == Chancellor) and add an Archbishop at the left, you get Minimal NPN Paulowich Chess. This pleases because there is, like Tutti-Frutti Chess, one of each.
I would like the center Pawn to be a Berolina Pawn. In front of the K, its move exposes; from the center, its move decentralizes; the choice of moving right or left may be critical.
--
gnohmon
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1 Jun 2001	None	Peter says,"Many of designers of these games are concerned with amount of draws that occur in FIDE Chess, and the degree to which memorized openings can dominate the game." I notice that Drawless Chess simply outlaws draws. Has anyone tried explicitly outlawing known openings? (Say, give each player an encyclopedia of known chess openings. If a player duplicates one of those openings, the opponent may require those moves to be undone. Or, specify that each player only use openings from a small predetermined menu)
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1 Jun 2001	None	David, in fact my name choice for this variant was influenced by "Chess on a Longer Board with a Few Pieces Added" -- it has a sort of cool, slightly ironic sound that appeals to me.
PBA
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1 Jun 2001	Good	This is weird: a couple of days ago, I came up with a variant that was exactly the same as your 'Minimal Not-Particularly-New Chess'!
Anyway, I like your use of the Unicorn piece to solve the Bishops being on the same color problem. Another, more radical solution would be to replace the Unicorn with a Bishop, and allow Bishops a non-capturing Wazir move for their first move. Then the player could decide if they want their Bishops to be on the same color squares, and all pawns would be covered.
--D. Howe
PS. I like the name you chose. Where you influenced by my "Chess on a Longer Board with a Few Pieces Added"? :)
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