Kevin Pacey wrote on Tue, Oct 3, 2017 12:21 AM UTC:Good ★★★★
I rate Berolina Chess as below Excellent since I somewhat dislike that pawns open files so easily, and that they can more easily become passed (plus Berolina pawns continually force the mind of an orthodox chess player to adjust at every stage of his calculations). The pawn structures that often result, in spite of not being clearly weak, also look ugly to the orthodox mind. On the bright side, such features (the merits of which can be debated) do attract a lot of variant players due to their novelty, in fundamentally shifting away from the foundation of standard pawns that is retained in so many variants.
As for chess, my estimates for the piece values would be: P=1; N=3.49; B=3.5; R=5.5; Q=10 and a fighting value of K=4 (though naturally it cannot be traded).
Here's an experiment 10x8 CV that uses Berolina Pawns also:
I rate Berolina Chess as below Excellent since I somewhat dislike that pawns open files so easily, and that they can more easily become passed (plus Berolina pawns continually force the mind of an orthodox chess player to adjust at every stage of his calculations). The pawn structures that often result, in spite of not being clearly weak, also look ugly to the orthodox mind. On the bright side, such features (the merits of which can be debated) do attract a lot of variant players due to their novelty, in fundamentally shifting away from the foundation of standard pawns that is retained in so many variants.
As for chess, my estimates for the piece values would be: P=1; N=3.49; B=3.5; R=5.5; Q=10 and a fighting value of K=4 (though naturally it cannot be traded).
Here's an experiment 10x8 CV that uses Berolina Pawns also:
https://www.chessvariants.com/play/gamma2-chess