Single Comment

2 Queen Rocky Horror Lycanthropic Chess. Featuring pieces that automatically flip into wyrd and not so strange counterparts. (10x8, Cells: 68) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Sam Trenholme wrote on Fri, Oct 16, 2009 01:21 AM UTC:

The way I like to handle royalty is to have it so, if we have multiple royal pieces, checkmating any of the pieces (or forking two or more of the royal pieces) is a win. I like doing it this way because, in a chess variant, it’s important to make attack strong and defense weak so the game is not too drawish. Then again, with an “iron” (non-capturable) piece that can transform in to a form that moves like a Queen, this may not be an issue.

Jeff Mallett seems to agree with me; in Zillions of Games, it’s somewhat difficult to program a variant with multiple royal pieces where the goal is to capture all of them (you need to add complex rules where the royal piece is off of the board until the player is at their last royal piece, at which point you put it on the board), but simple to program it so capturing any of the royal pieces win (just change the setup to put multiple kings on the board).

And oh, to be a pedantic Sheldon, while there is a transvestite in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, there is no werewolf. :)

While I’m being pedantic, pieces that change their move after being moved have been done before. This change was optional in Flip Chess/Shogi, and flipping is mandatory after every move in the 1976 game Kyoto Shogi (Wikipedia link which will work as long as some deletionist twit doesn’t succeed in deleting the article)

And, of course, there’s all the variants with rotating pieces out there; to the extent of my knowledge, the first variant with rotating chess pieces was Ploy, and, like Warlock chess, you lose a tempo when you rotate a piece (newer rotating variants have it so you rotate after moving the piece). Warlock looks to be new in the sense that the piece changes its nature that’s not merely rotating at the cost of a tempo.