Comments by Bob Greenwade

298. Chained Bishop, 299. Chained Rook, and 300. Chained Queen. These are related to (and, unconsciously, indirectly inspired by) the Helical Switchback Rhino and Griffin that were suggested to me by fellow CVP contributor Bn Em for Unnecessarily Complicated Chess. Given that today's my birthday and this set leads into #300, I thought it seemed like a fitting moment.

These pieces start by taking one step in the direction 45° from what the name would suggest: orthogonally for the Bishop, and diagonally for the Rook. They then turn 45° toward the intended general direction, step one space, then make another 45° turn the same direction (left or right) as the previous one, and continue making alternating turns of two left and two right (in either order) until reaching their destination.

For example, here's the Chained Bishop (Wafs(afqafz)Wafsafq(afzafq)W):

And the Chained Rook (Fafs(afqafz)Fafsafq(afzafq)F):

The Chained Queen, naturally, combines the two (Kafs(afqafz)Kafsafq(afzafq)K).

The marking for "Chained" was tossed together as a casual experiment, and I was surprised at how well it worked, at least to my eye.

I can imagine how "Chaining" could be applied to other pieces as well -- not just compounds like Chancellor and Archbishop, but also bent sliders like Rhino/Manticore and Eagle/Griffin, or even leaping sliders like Ostrich and Osprey or Tiger and Striped Dragon. (I'm not so sure how well a Chained Nightrider would work, though.)

I'm unable to open that link in either Firefox or Discord.

Well, for names, since the Bishops are also slow checkmaters, I'd give them names to fit: Conway and Buzzi (it doesn't matter which is which). The Rooks are fine as Trumpets, but I'd go with Left and Right. Ranged Oyster would seem better as Giant Oyster (I do like the Oyster part).

As for icons, the Sloth and Turtle would be the Aardvark and Turtle (respectively) with the Three in front. The Conway and Buzzi could be Abbot and Abbess, either alone or with the Confused emoticon, Grey color, or Hourglass behind. The Trumpets are probably fine as they are (at least until I can figure out and upload a Trumpet icon for the set). A Giant Oyster could be what you use, or perhaps Malkia or Kuhani with the Large modifier.

(I'd do some experimenting to see which of these icons would look best, but I have a few other things going on today, and my brain isn't quite firing on all cylinders.)

Yesterday was such a weird day that I forgot to post the PotD, even though by the end of the day I thought I'd done it. So...

295. Quarterback. Expanding on my set of pieces with an American Football theme, the Quarterback is probably the most complex of the lot.

The piece's basic move is to any space within a two-square range, but without leaping.

It also has two options for an initial move. The first is to "jump" the front line: it can leap two spaces in any direction forward; or it can leap over any piece in one of the three spaces directly in front of it to the second space beyond that, without capture.*

The other option for an initial move is the chess equivalent of a pass: the Quarterback swaps places with any friendly piece on the board. (K2nNifhSiffNipfampfamfhKipfampfhamfKimpfapsampz(vs)amfWimpfapsampszafsmWiudU)**

At first I thought I'd need to adjust this piece and make the stars smaller, but once it rendered fully I decided that that would be unnecessary.

(As for today's piece, I'll try to get that up this afternoon.)

*In the XBetza code, I'm frankly a little unsure about the part about jumping over a piece to the second beyond, even though I tested all four parts of that and they all worked as expected.

**Probably this would be much shorter with bracket notation; my brain isn't functioning right to figure it out right now, though.

An interesting group! I'd probably use different names and icons for the Bishop and Rook pieces, but to each his own.

294. Cerberus. There are multiple ideas of what Cerberus would be like as a chess piece; I figure that the Cerberus move should be triple that of a Dog. However, I've found two versions of Dog, one from large shogi variants and the other by Musketeer Chess (both of which I should post sometime soon; I thought I already had). I decided to base Cerberus off the latter.

The Musketeer Dog (which I like to call Big Dog) has a move of one space sideways or three spaces diagonally; that would give Cerberus a move of three sideways and nine diagonally. The latter seems enough that it might as well be a slide. (BsW3)

I think it would be interesting to see how existing games with their own version of Cerberus would fare with this in its place.

Modeling Cerberus as a chess piece is hard; mine isn't the only attempt at it. I think it does the job, though.

What's the game under discussion here? (I'm seeing this discussion on the Sign In page.)

That's a possibility, if I can find a way to differentiate the piece from the regular Turtle (the move for which I still need to edit).

If I could try it with a Peacekeeper (AXNX) I think that might have a higher number.

291. Señora (Argentinian Queen) and 292. Saltador (Argentinian Knight). I actually was getting something else ready for this weekend, and then realized that I'd already uploaded another version of it, so here are two pieces that go with the Faro and Loco from two weekends ago.

To refresh, the Argentinian sliders capture like the conventional pieces, but must jump over another piece in order to move without capture. The Faro (Rook) does this orthogonally and the Loco (Bishop) does it diagonally, so naturally the Señora (Queen) does both. (cQmpQ)

The Saltador (Knight) is a slightly different story. It moves like a normal Knight, particularly when capturing, but can only move without capturing if at least one of the two spaces it's jumping past has a piece in it. (cnNpafsmK)

The Saltador looks a little weird, but then again most of my "enhanced Knight" pieces look weird because the enhancements are meant for symmetrical pieces, which Knights are not.

Is there a way to enter XBetza on this? I wanted to try out the Blue Gecko (frB4lbW2flFbrFfW) but I can't limit the B move to 4 on this diagram.

I think I've mentioned in our game chat why I prefer KNAD (or, to me, KNS) for the Lion: it does at least have some history. I don't know of anywhere else where a Lion is BNS. (Even so, if it had an adjective on the name, reflected by a compound in the Greenwade graphic, I could deal with it.)

In other news, I'm told that the problem I was having with Thingiverse's editor has been patched up as of last Tuesday. I haven't tested it out yet; I probably will do so over the weekend.