Basic Tactics with the Fairy Pieces

Everyone is familiar with forks, pins, and skewers, but not really familiar with the same motifs with different pieces. Here are some examples of tactics with the fairy pieces. Post fairy tactics from your games! (Note: some pieces were excluded either because they were redundant (e.g. the Dabbaba and Alfil bc the Alibaba was covered) or they moved the same as normal pieces (e.g. the Amazon, Hawk, and Elephant, etc. bc they are a combination of normal pieces and will have similar tactics).

Alibaba: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3768097

Wildebeest: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3768151

Grasshopper: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3768240

Grasshopper/Camel Rider: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3768351

Camel Rider: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3768389

Knight Rider: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3768406

Alfil Rider: https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3768442

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i tested a game and the link is below it is 4 knights game if you want to click o it then do it if not then you can watch a more intresting one tomorrow the  game link is belowhttps://www.chess.com/4-player-chess?g=3899608-3.

I honestly can't think of any tactics other than forks for the fairy pieces.

Hey. Are those fairy pieces implemented and available for usage ?

yes

I question the decision to not include combination pieces. Pieces are not strictly the sum of their parts.

Consider this piece. Because we need a name, we shall call it a hurricane half-knight. 3 moves of mobility is marked.

Now, let's observe a few things about these pieces?

1. They're colorbound to 1/5th of all squares, though it's an even mix of light and dark squares.

2. Despite being colorbound, they are not identically colorbound to one another.

3. They have low mobility beyond their first move. Each has 4 new squares it can reach right now, 8 it can reach in two moves, 12 it will take 3 moves to reach, etc.

What would we expect their combination piece to be? Perhaps it would be colorbound to 2/5 of all squares, have 8 squares it can reach in a single move, have 16 it can reach in two moves, have 24 it can reach in 3 moves, etc?

Well, here is their move pattern superimposed.

Immediately we can see our prediction was wrong. 4 of the tertiary moves were reachable by both pieces. So it actually reaches 8 squares in one move and 16 in two, but only 20 in three instead of 24. Effectively its combination move pattern interferes with itself several moves deep and causes it to be colorbound to 36% of the board rather than 40%. So the piece is less than the sum of its parts, right?

But we're missing something very important here. We superimposed 3 moves of HhN with 3 moves of ThN. But we didn't add any combinations of the two. Upon doing this, we can see the true power of a knight is much stronger than the sum of its parts.

That means that instead of 8 squares on the first move and 16 squares reachable on the second, we end up with 32 reachable on the second! A knight has much greater tactical power than these weak half knights. And we can see it reaches much more than 36% of the board. Maybe even all of it.

And indeed, we can see that instead of reaching 20 new squares on move 3, it reaches 68! Not only this, but this pattern will now obviously tile the plane. It isn't colorbound.

So, combining two pieces that are colorbound to a fifth of the board and are very unmaneuverable, creates not a piece that is colorbound to two fifths of the board with mediocre maneuverability, but a piece which isn't colorbound at all, having access to the whole board, and has superb maneuverability.

I'm struggling to think of examples off the top of my head, but I strongly suspect the dynamics of some of the combination pieces are more than the sum of their parts, and should give them greater emergent tactical power than the contributions of those parts.

Note that it also matters what pieces you choose to combine. If we imagine combining the right half of a hurricane half knight with the left half of a hurricane half knight, we get our original hurricane half knight.

If we combine the right half of a hurricane half knight with the left half of a typhoon half knight though, we get a crab. 🦀

The crab is a very strong piece for its size.  Significantly stronger than either the Hurricane or Typhoon half knights. Its moves face forward, which helps, but it also isn't colorbound and is noticeably more maneuverable than the two cyclones I just described, with 4 squares within one move, 10 within two moves, and 19 within 3 moves, instead of 4, 8 and 12.

So not only do combination pieces matter, but there is often more than one way to combine two similar-strength pieces and some of them are way more advantageous than others. Note however that even superimposing a crab and a barc (an upside down crab) does not fully convey what a knight can do. Emergent extra maneuverability is the norm even for pieces that are already pretty maneuverable.

Nor are being colorbound and being maneuverable mutually exclusive. The camel is exactly as maneuverable as the knight on an infinite board (edges not shown here), with the same 8 -> 32 -> 68 growth in moves, despite being colorbound.

So the fact that a piece is colorbound doesn't necessarily create a good reason for it to be less maneuverable. It is because of how the individual moves are combined that a piece can be colorbound, and also that a piece can be maneuverable or not. But they're not the same. Nonetheless, emergent extra tactical power is the rule rather than the exception and combination pieces should have the ability to do things that their constitutents don't.