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First of all, thanks for posting the Rose symbol on this site. I used it in Rose Chess XII, another game where the Rose piece is limited to at most four Knight-leaps.

'ROOKS: are Circular Kings.' - is this a Halfling version of the piece from Ralph Betza's Chess on a Really Big Board? Also called a Rhinoceros in John Savard's Leaping-Missing Bat Chess.

Not sure how a (Halfling) Circular Alibaba moves, but it seems that half of the squares on the board can never be visited by any of these 8 pieces. For example: squares (c1), (c12), (d2), (d11). In Leaping-Missing Bat Chess each army has 4 Alfils and 2 Dabbabahs - together they cover the entire board. John Savard writes: 'Because the board has an even number of ranks, the squares reachable by one of White's Alfils are the squares reachable by one of Black's Dabbabbas, and vice versa.'

Thanks for the comments.

Charles, I think the Circular Alibaba is in fact one of the major themes of the game.  Even though it's awfully colour-bound, it's quite mobile. To resolve the issue of the whole board, I though about allowing the player to make one Knight move with either Circular Alibaba, but placing four Alibabas in the setup feels more natural.

Also, the Diamond (Ferzaba) is not as symmetrical as the other pieces.

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David, yes, you're right about the Circular King, it moves exactly like the Rhinoceros. The Circular Alibaba moves in a similar manner to the Circular King, but making Dabbabah and Alfil moves instead of Ferz and Wazir moves.

In fact, the Circular Alibaba at a1 CAN reach c1. So it's the case with the other squares you mentioned.

I have to mention that my definition (or rather, my understanding,) of the Halfling Circular Rider is different from a Halfling Linear Rider. The Halfling Linear moves half the squares up to the EDGE of the board. The Halfling Circular, in theory, reaches the same squares the Normal Circular does. However, while the Normal Circular has TWO paths to any cell in a certain circle, the Halfling has one (the one with the shortest steps.)

To explain better, the Rose can go from 6 o'clock to 4 o'clock by two paths: through 5 o'clock or 7 o'clock. The Halfling Rose only has the
5 o'clock route. However, it still reaches 12 o'clock by two paths.

My mistake, while thinking about the circular movement, I completely forgot that it makes Alfil and Dabbabah moves. The Halfling Rose was defined to make 1 to 4 Knight-leaps, regardless of its position on the board. For an ASCII diagram of the 32 possible (Halfling) Rose moves on a 16x16 board, see my Game Courier Preset Page for Rose Chess XII.

'Pawns on the fifth are entitled a forward triple step.' Should that read third? Also you wrote: 'Circular Alibabasinit'.

Well let's see what they can reach (albeit lamely):

FIDE Rook: 1:0, 2:0, 3:0, 4:0 etc.;
FIDE Bishop: 1:1, 2:2, 3:3, 4:4 etc.;
Circular King: 1:0, 1:1, 2:1, 2:2, 3:0, 3:1;
Circular Waffle: 1:0, 2:2, 3:2, 3:3, 5:0, 5:1;
Circular Fezbaba: 1:1, 2:0, 3:1, 4:0, 3:3, 4:2;
Circular Alibaba: 2:0, 2:2, 4:2, 4:4, 6:0, 6:2.

I took 'Alibabasinit' as a reference to the character Ali G, who does use the Bhangramuffin expression 'init?' in much the same way as the Welsh use its full form 'isn't it?' and the French 'n'est ce pas?'