Hex Besiege

It recently struck me that no-one had actually done a hex version of the original Besiege Chess, so I decided to fill this gap, building on McCooey's hex Chess. The Wellisch orientation was ruled out because joining two hex boards edge-to-edge would make things too lopsided. As two McCooey boards thus connected form two lobes meeting at corners I adjusted the board ends by merging the corner cells to make the lobes overlap and cementing the rest together with triangular joins of 3 extra cells on either side. This raised the number of cells from the expected 182 (91x2) to 187 while reducing the centre file's length from 22 to 21 cells.

My comments on Besiege Chess include a suggestion that, rather than replacing the second King with a third Queen, it might be more interesting to replace the second King and Queen with Knighted pieces. The equivalent pieces here struck me as having rather too much power, and their names of Seaseholder and Seprechaun are rather desperate in any case. Instead I went for Crowned pieces, specifically the pair used in Fergus Duniho's family of hex Shogis. Indeed the Crowned pieces of standard Shogi might be a further alternative in the original Besiege Chess, where they would redistribute the King and Queen move components (albeit minus royal restriction). In Notes I give two examples of how square-cell Besiege variants could use both Knighted and Crowned pieces, which I have previously used together in Modern Manners and Conclave Ecumenical Chess. As I termed one of the hex Crowned pieces the Besieger this is the first Besiege variant to feature the piece whose name so echoes the theme.

Setup

Even with the 3-cell triangles there remain concavities, and I adopt my usual one-foot-in-the-grave rule. This means that each Knight leap, and each step of a diagonal move (though not necessarily the entire move) must be made either within a lobe or within the middle 7 files. For example a diagonal step must have a cell on each side of the border that it follows.

3 players, Blue under siege

3 players, Red under siege

Pieces

	The GRANDDUKE moves one step along orthogonals and hex diagonals and must be kept out of Check. It is the Glinski/McCooey analogue to the FIDE and Shogi King, under whose page its hex move may be found.
	The DUCHESS moves any distance through empty intermediate cells along orthogonals and hex diagonals. It is the G/McC analogue to the FIDE Queen, under whose page its hex move may be found.
	The VICEREINE moves any distance through empty intermediate cells along orthogonals and one step along hex diagonals. It is the G/McC analogue to the Chatelaine, under whose page its hex move may be found.
	The BESIEGER moves any distance through empty intermediate cells along hex diagonals and one step along orthogonals. It is the G/McC analogue to the Primate, under whose page its hex move may be found.
	The ROOK moves any distance through empty intermediate cells along orthogonals.
	The UNICORN moves any distance through empty intermediate cells along hex diagonals. It is the G/McC analogue to the FIDE Bishop, under whose page its hex move may be found.
	The SENNIGHT makes root-7 hex leaps. It is the G/McC analogue to the FIDE Knight, under whose page its move may be found.
	The BROKER moves one step along the straight-forward orthogonal, except when capturing which it does along either forward hex diagonal. It is the McCooey analogue to the FIDE Pawn.

Rules

Notes

Here are the square-cell variants mixing Knighted and Crowned pieces. The variant to the left has three FIDE sets with two joined at the Black camps and two at the White camps, with a Chatelaine (using the same image as the Duchess, but the two cannot coexist in 2d) and Primate replacing each of the innermost royal couples, and a Marshal and Cardinal each of the outermost ones. The variant below has two sets on boards enlarged to 9x9, with an extra Pawn in each of the relevant ranks and the 3 pairs of compound pieces in between the simple ones. They are distributed to array one half of the board as Chancellor Chess.