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Warrior Chess. Game where pieces earn money so that you can buy Warriors and weapons to arm them with. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Mike Nelson wrote on Fri, Nov 1, 2002 12:37 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

I really like this game design. The use of unarmed warriors for blocking
and the aggressive king moves in the building phase give thew game a most
unusual flavor.  Overall game machanics are complex but playable.  The use
of familiar pieces for weapons helps keep the complexity in bounds.  The
Swords weapon in an interesting type of superpawn--it might be usable in
other games as well.  

A small suggestion.  Rook/Swords and Bishop/Swords are overvalued and will
mainly come into play when there are no good alternatives.  How about
allowing Rook/Swords to have the capture power of Swords/Swords and the
Bishop/Swords to have the non-capturing movement power of the
Swords/Swords? This would correct the overvaluation and bring the
interesting pieces into play.

JustinBridges wrote on Mon, Nov 4, 2002 10:43 PM UTC:

Mike -
Thanks for the feedback.  

I agree with you that the Rook/Swords and Bishop/Swords combinations are
overvalued, but sometimes you have to overpay to make a piece a little
stronger.  Actually the weakest and most overvalued combo of all is the
Swords/Swords, but given the right circumstances it can still be a great
piece.

The game creates situations that force players to play these 'bad' combos
and one of your goals should be to try to get your opponent into a trap
where they have to overpay for weapons.  (Think of it as the 'economics'
battle in the game.)

Just as you overpay for Rook/Swords, Bishop/Swords and Swords/Swords, you
underpay for putting Rook/Bishop, Rook/Knight and Bishop/Knight combos
into play.  The relative values only hold for a warrior using a single
weapon while the combined pieces will have varying degrees of over and
undervaluation. 

Despite its slight overvaluation, I really like the Rook/Swords combo,
because it is such an effective attacker, but is vulnerable to a rear
flank by a dropped Warrior.

Since the game is already a bit complex, I didn't really want to add more
movement options to the undervalued combos, even though it might make
sense.

Thanks again for trying Warrior Chess and please keep the feedback coming.
 
-Justin