Seems pretty imbalanced to me. The player with the bishops is forced to weaken his kingside/queenside pawns if he wishes to castle. Then again, having 4 bishops is overpowered as fuck, and I don't think four knights are any match for them. Anyway, who knows. I don't really enjoy this set up.
EDIT: Whoops, accidentally made it a puzzle. Oh well.
Seems pretty imbalanced to me. The player with the bishops is forced to weaken his kingside/queenside pawns if he wishes to castle. Then again, having 4 bishops is overpowered as fuck, and I don't think four knights are any match for them. Anyway, who knows. I don't really enjoy this set up.
EDIT: Whoops, accidentally made it a puzzle. Oh well.
I wasn't envisioning one player with four bishops and the other with four knights, but each with 4 of the same as the opponent. But interesting. Let me try your puzzle.
I'm thinking that with the bishops vs. knights version, I might actually go with the knights. Two bishops are usually better than two knights, but I'm not sure that extrapolates out with 4 vs. 4. Two bishops on the same diagonal aren't a whole lot better than one. Black would also have to take extra care to make sure White couldn't trade off two bishops sitting on the same colors. Two knights are definitely better than two light-squared bishops!
I'm thinking that with the bishops vs. knights version, I might actually go with the knights. Two bishops are usually better than two knights, but I'm not sure that extrapolates out with 4 vs. 4. Two bishops on the same diagonal aren't a whole lot better than one. Black would also have to take extra care to make sure White couldn't trade off two bishops sitting on the same colors. Two knights are definitely better than two light-squared bishops!
But bishops of the same color could cover each other (like rooks do on the perpendiculars). But when you say "light squared" bishops, I suspect that has something to do with kingside, but I'm not as well studied on the idioms of bishopry, so I will look into it.
I was using light-squared bishops as an example. Two dark-squared are equally ineffective.
The comparison with rooks doesn't pan out in my view. Rooks can still travel to any square on the board. But no matter how many dark-squared bishops you have, you can cover half the board at best.
seems like it'd be fairly balanced no matter what- i can imagine it'd probably be fun to have both players write down what four minor pieces they get and in what positions, leaving the king queen and rooks where they are though, and when both players have written it down, reveal what was chosen and thats what they play with. so either player could have 4 knights, or 4 bishops, or anything in between.
edit: oh and i almost forgot, there is a variant of minichess with 2 bishops vs 2 knights on a 6x6 board, called mallett chess
Gentlemen, for your enjoyment... Allow me to present the great quad-bishop/quad-knight bang-up. Here is Critter16a in a 5min + 2 sec game against itself. Sorry I had to delete two pawns or the interface wouldn't accept the position as legal.
I wonder how viable interesting or workable chess would be as a game if instead of each player having 2 bishops and 2 knights that they had 4 of either, occupying the original squares as the pieces they replace. Such that:
PPPPPPPP
RBBQKBBR
or
PPPPPPPP
RNNQKNNR
Unfortunately, doing all my playing online at chess.com, not so easy to experiment with that. Not that it would be a very valuable exercise. Just idle curiosity more than anything.