Single Comment

I own alike set (interesting, was it made with permission of modest solans?), but worse: players control pieces of identical colours, but one of players controls transparent pieces, other controls opaque pieces, and it's very hard to discriminate piece's side (when i got this set, i did not knew about chess variants, and i was thinking 'that a fool made this set?!'... But in set, there was no any booklet with rules of any heraldic chess game, so, maybe, author of set did not knew about variants to, and was made for sake of beauty, but it's unlikely... They should include rules in set).

I have some ideas about heraldic chess.
First,  Charles Gilman's idea about pawn promotion: can be used for normal chess, but several different variants for promotion of king's pawn are possible:
it can promote to non-royal king;
it can promote to royal king, and opponent will have to capture both kings;
it can promote to royal king, and opponent will have to capture either king (here promotion of king's pawn is mostly bad idea, opponent can win by forking);
it can promote to amazone (as in russian chess - http://www.chessvariants.org/difftaking.dir/russianchess.html )
it can promote to queen.
Second, include in deck cards 'move any piece of that type' and 'move any piece of that color'.
Third, playing communist chess with this set: http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MScommunistchess
-pieces of similar colors must removed or promoted.
Fourth, heraldic Shogi. I have 2 ideas about it:
first, pieces on same files similar colored: there are mostly 2 pieces of each color, expect for pieces on 2nd and 8th files: there is 3 pieces of each color: honourable horse, pawn and flying chariot or angle walker.
Second, each piece of first rank have same color as it's pawn, flying chariot have same color as angle walker.
Heraldic Xiang-qi needs some thinking... I have 2 ideas, but they don't look very good... First, each piece of 1st rank have same color as pawn or cannon in front of it, advisors are not different. Second: advisor-elephant, knight-elephant's pawn, cannon-another cannon... Another idea is to use additional pieces from one of 3-players Xiang-qi variants.