Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I like the new piece suggestions, but the names need work.
(Elephant is overused, for example.)

However, 'its'' is not a valid English construction.
No possessive pronoun carries an apostrophe:
his, her, my, your, their, its, whose, thy.

Dear Annoying:
    Are you telling me that, 50 years ago, my second grade teacher, Sister
Mary Ruler, was wrong when she drilled the class in possessives? I quote:  
 ''It's' means 'it is'; 'its'' means  'that belongs to it'.' 

     I hereby confess to over-punctuating, as I have already confessed to
having trouble with names. Suggestions for names would be appreciated (but
I remind you this is a family site), and will be considered.
     
     Finally, I would like to thank Mr. Gifford and Mr. Pedant for their
comments. As my computer skills are about as obsolete as my English usage,
it may be a while before I can add rules illustrations or presets, much as
I would like to do so.

Ah, John, you don't think I can get an elephant through a hurricane in a
reed boat? (Okay, a very strong tropical depression.) I can see the
islanders laughing at the entire concept of that mythological monster, the
imaginary elephant, but still keeping the name for the game piece. The
expression 'seeing the elephant' would take on an entirely different
meaning for them, though.
Seriously, thanks for the comment. I am still fishing for names; maybe I
should run some contests: Name that Game and Name that Piece.

You asked for names for compound pieces. Well one of them is known by
several names, and I have proposed some for others. Here are the names
with the basic reasoning behind them. For more details of each group see
my piece articles Constitutional Characters, The Heavy Brigade, and
Diverse Directions respectively.
	The capturable piece moving like a King is known variously as a Guard,
Mann (a German word meaning, in this context, henchman), or Prince. The
last is my preferred name for it, as part of a larger pattern of royal
names for orthogonal+diagonal, ducal for orthogonal+triagonal, and
imperial for all three.
	For pieces mixing one-step and two-step radial components I have
proposed
extrapolating from the Waffle (Wazir+Alfil) and the all-two-step Alibaba
(Alfil+Dabbaba): Wazir+Dabbaba=Wazbaba, Ferz+Alfil=Fearful, and for the
record Ferz+Dabbaba=Fezbaba. These names have the disadvantage of being
too abstract for some tastes.
	For pieces with a Knight move I have proposed Knight+Wazir=Marshlander
(a
punning name for a short-range version of the Marshal),
Knight+Ferz=Cardilander (a similarly suffixed Cardinal),
Knight+Alfil=Kangaroo (from Timothy Newton's Outback Chess), and most
contentiously Knight+Dabbaba=Carpenter (a name alluding to the
manufacture
of war engines and toy horses, and to a Lewis Carroll character).

huh people bad mouthing the name 'elephant'?! :)
i like the name 'elephantqueen' for alfil/fers, everyone knows the
elephant mostly indicates alfil move, and fers is related to queen, i
think, in some way, he he, anyway, hey joe :)
(i love the name 'alibaba' hate the name 'fearful')

'The Dabbabahrider moves in (0,2) increments as opposed to the Rook's (0,1) steps. As a piece by itself, it is much weaker than a Knight, the main reason being that it is colorbound times colorbound -- it can visit only one fourth of all squares on the board. The Alfilrider is even worse, and can see only one eighth of all squares. Because of this extreme limitation, we have the interesting case where the AD (Alfil plus Dabbabah) has the same ideal value as the Knight but is much weaker in practice, while the AADD (Alfilrider plus Dabbabahrider) has an ideal value which is unknown but which must be appreciably larger than Knight -- but the practical value of AADD seems to be a bit less than a Knight.'

And now for something completely different!. Imagine Freeling's Grand Chess, with the Bishops replaced by Elephants and:

Queen replaced by Centaur = Knight + Wazir + Ferz

Marshall replaced by Grand Rook = Rook + Afil + Ferz

Cardinal replaced by Grand Bishop = Bishop + Dabbabah + Wazir

I am fascinated by the Centaur: try using the 'equesrex' BMP file - although strictly speaking that should be used for a 'royal' piece. And for the other two (brand new?) pieces: 'promotedrook' and 'promotedbishop' BMP files. Note the reversal of Freeling's arrangement, this time we have one Knight compound and two Queen-like pieces. I am inclined to squeeze the board down to 10x8, using the 'same' opening setup as our current PBM game.

[2007 EDIT] substituted 'Grand' for 'Great' in the piece names. [2008 EDIT] Key McKinnis used a wide selection of pieces in Drop Chess (2000), including the Demon (Grand Rook ) and the Pope (Grand Bishop).

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.

Great idea to explore short range moves, in the spirit of the ancient game!

Thank you, Tony, for the comment and the rating. Sorry I didn't notice it when you posted it. You were partly responsible for my interest in shatranj variants, way back when. The games were fun to do and I got to "meet" Christian Freeling in the process.

Fwiw, being very bad with awkward pieces, like the half-duck (HFD), and being terrified of relatively cheap but unblockable pieces capable of attacking several pieces at once, like the squirrel (NAD), I tried to design simple, obvious pieces that were easy to use and to understand. I didn't want them too powerful, but they needed to be much more capable than the original piece mix. It's nice to see some of my games being played. Thanks.