Interesting post. I use almost exclusively "vanilla" pieces in my games, most probably because I'm conscious that opening them to "non-vanilla" would drive me too far. I'm a bit afraid to look there, it's an infinite world, multi-dimensional. V.R.Parton was less shy than me and has explored this category a lot, you should look at it, it's interesting.
I have 2 questions: 1) do you consider xiangqi cannon a vanilla or not? Or janggi cannon? 2) why "vanilla" ? This escape by knowledge of English as a foreign language.
Finally, I hope this thread will not be hickjacked as too many on this site. The mods should do something...
Most chess or chess variant pieces are only defined by their way of moving and capturing, some other variant pieces tend to get special properties like freezing, immunity and transparency abilities.
Here I'm trying to come up with a definition of the first category. Somewhere I had seen that somebody used to call these pieces "vanilla pieces", as to distinguish them from special pieces. I can't find that page anymore but it seems to be a reasonable terminology.
Vanilla pieces are chess or chess variant pieces, that have no other property or ability than a way of moving, and capturing of enemy pieces.
A way of moving and capturing means a fixed set of vectors along which the piece can step, slide or leap from it's current square to it's new square.
If pieces conform to this definition, but their way of moving deviates from their way of capturing, I'll call them divergent vanilla pieces.
I'm asking myself if this definition is going to hold for long, or if I'm going to find cases where this definition does not coincide with what I intuitively see as vanilla.
Comments are welcome.
Examples
The FIDE King and pawn are not vanilla. Royalty, castle, en passant and promotion are special properties and abilities.
The FIDE Queen, Rook, Knight and Bishop are definitely vanilla pieces.
Compounds like R + N, B + N are vanilla. I think in general, any piece defined as the compound of two other vanilla pieces, is a vanilla piece.
The Bulldog Hunter is a divergent vanilla piece.
The Chu Shogi Lion is not vanilla, because of the odd trading rules. But I'm not sure if I want to call the Lion vanilla if we take away the trading rules.
The fairy pieces from Musketeer chess are all vanilla. But if I'm mistaken about this, I'm sure somebody will respond here.
W.r.t. divergent vanilla pieces, I realize that we can think of two extreme categories:
- Non-capturers: a piece can move but not capture.
- Non-movers: a piece can capture but not move.
By heart I don't know if non-capturers and non-movers are already part of an existing variant. But undoubtedly they classify as divergent vanilla pieces.