Suicidal dragon chess

I like the double-rank of pawns, and also the traditional setup of pieces, within the new ones. Are upright pawns the same as inverted ones, and what do the other new pieces do?

New pieces and rules:

1. Reversed pawn

Moves one square diagonally forward and can capture one square forward.

Worth one point

Represented by a up-side-down pawn

2. Guard

Moves like a king

Worth 3 points

Represented by a shield

3.Suicidal dragon

Moves like a king and cannot capture instead commits suicide by blowing up all enemy pieces next to it.

Worth 4 points 

Represented by a dragon

4.Archer

Moves like a knight and can shoot a piece 1 or 2 squares orthogonally or diagonally.

It does not move when shooting

Worth 7 points

Represented by a target

5. No en passant

you can move a reversed pawn or blow up one of your suicidal dragons

by the way reversed pawns can move two squares diagonally forward on their first turn.

Wouldn't this be an excedingly slow game, with so many steppers on such a deep board?

BTW, there already exist at least two other Chess variants called Dragon Chess, one of those even commercial.

Bomb

For me slow is OK. If playing by correspondence as long as a game can be finished within 1-2 years I think it would be OK. It adds a new type of drama - if you lose, it will be a long time (if ever) for you to win your revenge match. Every move in a game becomes more critical.

The tournament for chess on an infinite plane may have a similar phenomenon. While some games may finish in a normal amount of time (40 - 60 moves), I would not be surprised if several games go on for hundreds of moves.

The entire 8-player tournament may take a few years to complete. If you are a new aspiring game player and want to work your way up to steal the crown, you can plan on working at it for a few years. These games are not for the meek-of heart.

hello I'm silvertruck's other account

would anyone mind if i played a game vs myself

I think you underestimate how long a game like this would take. One big difference with this compared to your infinite plane variant is that this variant has a lot of short ranged pieces and there is a very thick wall of pawns for protection.

Short ranged pieces: 59 (pawns, reversed pawns, guard, suicidal dragon, archer, knights, king)

Long ranged pieces: 5 (rooks, bishops, queen)

Normally to get through a wall you would need to try to trade pawns, but it takes a lot of moves before you can start thinking about that. Also, since it would take a lot of time to get the slow pieces into play, there will pretty much always be way more defenders than attackers. You will need to watch out for archers, but other than that slowly moving your army forward might be the right way to go.

My guess is that a game could take about 300-400 moves on average (about 8-10 times as long as a chess game), but who knows. The game can't be played too slowly though if you want to complete it within 2 years.

If I had to guess the new value of the pieces I would go with something like:

Pawn: 1

Reversed pawns: 1

Suicidal dragon: 2

Knight: 3

Guard: 3

Bishop: 9

Rook: 15

Archer: 15

Queen: 27

My reasoning is that long ranged pieces get better on a bigger board. Suicidal dragons will probably be quite useful, but since they need to sacrifice themselves in order to recapture something they protect it is hard to rate them high. Being not worth much makes them easier to sacrifice though and harder for your opponent to get through any hole in your pawn structure.

Archers are really hard to predict, but their ability to cover squares and capture without moving should be worth a lot. I'm guessing it should be somewhere between queen and rook, but I put it at the same as rook for now.

You rate the guard way too high, it should be equal to a Knight.

Not sure why I put the guard so high. I edited the value to 3.

that's much better

The guard being 3 or 4 I don't care much. On an 8x8 board, I think the guard is slightly better than the knight, but on a 16x16 board, I am not as sure. The knights ability to attack archers without the archers being able to shoot them can also be considered as good for the knight. Guards, pawns and suicidal dragons will be heavily countered by the archers since those pieces can't really approach the archer.

The archer is unexplored territory, so as long as the value is quite high I won't complain. The archers relative value to the rook should depend a lot on how open the position is and how active the pieces are. If my opponent have a really active archer I would probably want to trade my rook for it.

The suicidal dragon, I think 5 is way too high. It's a bit like a passed pawn in the sense that it can be very powerful, but pawns are not valued high just because they have that potential.

It's at least 3