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Nasty Neighbours (conquer style). The goal of the game is to conquer the opponent's army and to add it to your own army. (9x8, Cells: 72) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Feb 11 08:24 AM UTC in reply to Gerd Degens from 08:00 AM:

Well, terms like 'Alfilrider' are very elementary, but refers to a piece that can jump over all squares it does not visit, like the leaper it was based on. The term Skip-Bishop is less commonly used for this piece; probably only when you want to stress its complementarity to the Slip-Bishop, (for which no other names are common), which boosts the rider move with a single step in the same direction, so that it can only go to the odd squares on the diagonal. (This is actually a much more interesting piece; the radial riders suffer from severe area binding, confining them to 1/4 or even 1/8 of the board, but the slip-sliders have the same board access as the slider they were based on.) The qualification 'lame' for a piece that cannot jump like it would normally do is also very common.

I think it would be better to stick to existing terminology when that is in widespread use.

I share the worry w.r.t. the severe area binding of the pieces, especially since you put most of them on the same area: all rooks and Bishops of one player are confined to the same 25% of the board, which is a different 25% from where the opponent's Rooks and Bishops are. The Bishops are furthermore confined to the same 12.5% of the board. Both Queens of a player are on the same 25% of the board. So basically the board factorizes in 4 independent quarter boards: one with two white Queens, one with two black Queens, one with two white Rooks and two white Bishops (the Bishops confined to the same half of that), and one similar for black. The conquer mechanism could transfer pieces to other areas, but only through capture by Pawns, Nightriders or Kings. Capture by Pawns you would of course avoid, and recapture by Pawns after trading would initially not happen, as the confined pieces cannot capture each other. So what remains is King and Nightriders.

We could re-order the board squares such that the confinement areas would become contiguous 4x4 areas. The Pawns and Nightriders would then get strange crooked move, leaping back and forthe between areas, but Q, R and B would become normal sliders, but confined to their 4x4 section. Looking at it that way, would you think that this game is winnable when only the two Nightriders are able to enter the enemy section? My feeling is that a player set on achieving a draw would just avoid the Nightriders from capturing any slider in their own two sections.