cool
My variation to Pemba
Sort:
Revision = Knights are now given the wazir (1,0) move (so it becomes identical to the Opulent Knight in Opulent Chess) to reduce the strength inequailty between it and the bishop, and to prevent it from being the subset of the nightrider
the image for the crocodile's moves
Putting strong pieces in a variant is not always a good idea. Too many strong pieces spoil the game. On a 10x10 with so many pieces, it is important to have several weak pieces.
Some thoughts:
1. I have trouble believing you won't end up getting >4.5 points of value out of a sorcerer in an environment where there are 10 targets on each side worth more than that. A cannon queen with positional resources is a scary thing. Whether you're gonna trade it or just use it to harass things I think it'll be every bit as strong as a rook. Indeed, on the page for Pemba, it suggests the cannon is worth 4 and the crocodile 3, and zillions automatically evaluates those pieces even higher. It may actually not be positional resources but brute force that makes this piece powerful.
2. The bulls can get a royal fork on move 2 if they go to a4, d4, g4, or j4 and then to d6 or g6. This can be stopped with the other side's bulls, knights, pawns, mastadons, or bishops, but it is there and it forces black into defending against such tactics immediately. I know you said you like tactical positions just worth mentioning you get very aggressive tactics straight out of the opening.
So, what's Pemba in the first place?
It's this variant =
This is a chess variant by Jean-Louis Cazaux, and an extension of Shako, one of his most popular variants. link = http://history.chess.free.fr/pemba.htm
Shako = http://history.chess.free.fr/shako_variant.htm (diagram below)
While Shako is a very good variant because of it's mix of strong and weak pieces, Pemba has too many weak pieces, especially for me, who liked variants with many rook-strength pieces.
The weak pieces i talked about are the Crocodile, Giraffe, and Camel.
The Giraffe, Crocodile, and Camel move like in the diagrams below =
See? They're very weak.
The Camel and Giraffe has a value of about 2 points because of their slightly awkward moves (although because of their long reach, they can have a value of up to maybe 3 points in the early parts of the game), while the Crocodile has a value of up to 2.5 (in mid-games if placed correctly) to as low as around 1 point (in the end-game).
Because of that, i propose a variant of Pemba, one with loads of rook-strength pieces, the new pieces are mostly combinations of the weak pieces, the Cannon, the Machine, and the Elephant, but there's one type of piece with moves strictly unique to this variant (meaning that you can't replicate this piece in Pemba, even if you combined the moves of the pieces in that variant to create another piece).
New Piece #1 = Bull
It can either move as a Giraffe or Camel (look at the diagrams above), so it's move look like this=
The Bulls start behind the Rooks.
New piece #2 = Sorcerer
It may either move as the Cannon =
or the Crocodile (see the diagram above).
So it moves like this =
The white arrow indicates the directions of how the Sorcerer can move, blue arrow indicates the space where it can jump from, jumping the piece between it and the victim to capture.
The white Xs indicates the pieces that the Sorcerer can currently capture, white circle indicates where the cannon can go to (without capturing, i'd also add that it may never jump except to capture an opponent piece)
And the white circle WITH the red X indicates that the Sorcerer must move into that space (then continue moving until it captures), but it can't stop there.
That means that the Sorcerer moves like the Queen, but to capture, it has to jump exactly one piece, the piece between it and it's victim.
The Sorcerers start in the corners of the board, where the Cannons in Shako and Pemba would normally start.
New piece #3 = Mastodon
It may either move as the Machine =
or the Elephant =
So it moves like this =
The Mastodons start in the spaces where the Elephants in Shako and Pemba would normally start.
New piece #4 = Nightrider
Now, this is the "strictly unique" piece i talked about, it moves as a Knight any amount of times, but only in one direction (think of it as the rider version of the Knight, the same way that the Queen is the rider version of the King (without castling and royal status, of course)).
It moves like this =
Note that the arrows just indicate the directions of the Nightrider's movement, and any space in the diagram without the white circle are jumped over by the Nightrider. Also note that the Nightrider are not limited to three steps, but can move any amount of times in one direction, the Nightrider can only move to and/or capture a piece in the spaces with the white circles, the nightrider can be blocked, but only in the spaces that it can go to. (for example, a nightrider can't go from a3 to e5 if c4 is occupied).
The nightriders start behind the knights.
So, the starting layout is like this =
All the new pieces are around Rook strength (Sorcerer = 4.5, Bull =~5.5 to 6, Mastodon = 6, Nightrider = 5.5), Note that the Machine, Crocodile, Cannon, Camel, Giraffe, and Elephant doesn't exist in this game.
The difference of the amount of the major and minor pieces are still the same as in Chess, because the Bull and Mastodon are major, while the Sorcerer and Nightrider are minor.
This would make the game far more exciting and more tactical, while retaining the complex strategies that arise in Pemba and Shako (and potentially making the strategies for this variant far more complex and beautiful).
So, what's the name of my variant?
I don't have a really good name for this variant, but i'd go with Mafia Chess (since it has slightly less pieces than Pemba, and Mafia Island is the third most populated island of Zanzibar Archipelago, behind Unguja and Pemba)