Paco Åœako NEW game

Paco Ŝako Super combo! Who's the first to dance with the other player's king!

Promote your pawn to a knight and kabam, Paco (peace)! 

Have you heard of this new game? Any thoughts?

Yes I know it. This game has a lot of fans. I myself am not a fan for subjective reasons (I want to capture, not dance).

You can capture the heart of the other player's king and win his or her kingdom.  

Well, a Game of Peace does suit Xmas

I can highly recommend it. Paco Shako is an intriguing game, and it is completely unclear what strategic goal one should adopt when 'king hugging' is not imminent. In orthodox Chess you can go for material gain, or simplification when ahead, but here, in absence of capture, all material always stays on the board. The pieces can get paired, but it is not obvious at all who benefits the most from inhomogeneous pairing such as Q with P, and whether that would be a larger benefit than for (say) P with N or N with Q. I guess it is not so much a game that you can learn, as well a game that you must discover. The chained releases give rise to very deep tactics.

Besides, the pieces are beautifully sculpted, and worth having for their ornamental value alone. Of course Paco Shako can be played with a normal Chess set on a board intended for a larger one, so that you can cram two pieces on one square, but that is truly ugly.

The description of Paco Shako at chessvariants.com contains a simple demo applet that you can play against. (That same demo is probably also on the Paco Shako website.)

This 'hug' principle could be combined with any existing variant. Paco Musketeer, Paco shogi, Paco Chu. 

That holds for any rule modification that doesn't reflect on board and pieces. You can have Capablanca Crazyhouse, Spartan Suicide, Xiangqi 3Checks, Atomic Makruk, Alice Chu Shogi, Shatranj960, Marseillais Courier Chess, King of the Shogi Hill...

Indirectly you say that there is no clue about, or an absence of, long term strategic concepts. Just a deep ocean of tactics where deep calculation wins 

Little clue, but I consider it unlikely to be entirely absent. Asymmetric pairing will likely have strategic value, perhaps as important as piece values. But we still have to discover them. We don't even know their sign. Although my theory is that pairing piece with Pawn is good for the piece.

So far I have discovered the following tactics, strategies and game aspects. 

- Funny enough although there is no piece capture, players have mentioned it has a very aggressive play (I say assertive). It can pick up pace very fast and pieces can be played forward quite freely.

- Yes, you also have to consider which pieces (and when) to bring into unions and when not.

- Also keeping the connection between pieces is important and the possibility to release certain pieces out of unions.

- As games develop into endgames, connections and what pieces are free becomes more important.

- There are slowly emerging some standard openings.

There is still a lot to discover about openings, tempo, connections, and strategies. I'm still surprised how games can shift and how creative the gameplay is and how different the strategies are at different stages in the game. 

This was a nice end combo I played against Hans Böhm. I had the momentum going for a long time while giving Sako (check). Though I ended up with many of my pieces into a union. If I did not see this final move, I would have lost my momentum and Böhm probably had won the game, because he has several pieces free in this endgame. It was quite a nice combo. The (subjective) joy of this game is in seeing and playing for these patterns and combinations than for piece capture. There is no piece advantage in Paco Sako.