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• If you transform the pieces so you have no royal pieces on the board, you instantly lose
• If you have only one royal piece on the board, the other piece is unable to transform

Thanks for taking time to look over my variant, Sam, and of course I appreciate your feedback too. Certainly you propose valid variants in their own. Your idea about a checked piece not being allowed to transform is especially worthy of experimentation! ;)

You also indicate one serious lacuna in the rules which I shall now attempt to remedy. An extra rule had been in there before but then I thought erroneously I'd already eliminated the loophole. You helped me realize there is too much ambiguity without it. What I should have preserved was the rule that you must have either a queen, mamra, king or wuss at all times or you've lost. So I shall now point out the another way a win can be effectuated by stating the same thing differently in the rules.

I will quibble with you just a bit from the Department of 'Many Ways to Skin a Cat'. Games with supernumerary royal pieces address the issue of checkmate successfully in different ways, each one having its own flavor. Some allow you to capture one before checkmating the other; some are not so merciful. Here I have potentially more than four royal pieces (if pawns promotes to a queen or mamra, there can be more) and to deal with that curious situation, I steal some flavorful ideas from Dan Troyka's Wuss and from Abdul Rahman-Sibahi's Kings. In Mamra Chess with Wuss there are two royal pieces and four ways to win (perhaps you might say five if you include checking simultaneously king and wuss). It is not necessary to checkmate both kings in Mamra Chess with Wuss (likewise here). It's only necessary to checkmate one and usually that one is the Wuss because the Wuss, even though it can move like a queen, is generally easier to checkmate.

The Wuss is so relatively easy to checkmate in fact that I thought the game itself would have more punch and vibrancy if I allowed it to transform instead of always remaining a Wuss. Enter the Werewolf. That is also in keeping with the theme of this game which welds the most powerful pieces to the most weakening pieces (queen to king). The Mamra, more powerful than the Queen, is hybrided to the Wuss, which is more weakening than the King.

1) Were you doing this because I like Mamra Chess with Wuss so much?

Well, you were definitely a big part of the mix. This new variant was conceptualized in part because of how facilely you keep beating me at this other game. For me, lots of playtesting is central to inventing. Hopefully you will beat me less easily in this new one yet like it even more! :)

[I deleted the rest of this post because Nicholas's reflections ultimately led to a rule change after further consultation with him. Thanks, Nicholas.]

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.

Thanks for your help, guys! :)

Updated: See section on pieces for Wuss and Mamra, King and Queen and see notes at bottom for acknowledgements. See also revised checkmating rules under rules section.

This game can be played with a real board using checkers with pictures of the piece on each side of each checker.

Hi John. Yes. 

Edit...

Afterthought: Yes but in a way no, because at some point it will have transformed in the process of moving - hence it will never actually have been a wuss in check.

To John Smith: I've finally figured out how to answer your question. If a Cylindrical Bishop goes to an x or y square it acts normally and not cylindrically. The board shall be regarded as cylindrical only in an 8 x 8 way while seeming to exclude the unusual corner squares (which still exist, just not in cylindrical space). I've updated the rules to reflect this. Thank you for bringing attention to this formerly unaddressed problem.