Horseman's chess (PnP)

Thanks for the insights. As the game stands right now, each player picks the mounts they want for the back-row pieces with the restriction that the King must ride a Jumper. Yes, the ability to leap intermediate pieces is a bit useless when your range is one... this is intended to (1) keep the King reasonably capturable at the start and (2) provide the player with a spare mount.

I like the idea of putting the Pawns on mounts to start, though a Pawn starting on a Charger can be problematic (in the chess variant I saw with a similar piece, it was called a Superpawn and specifically prohibited from capturing en-passant). [Note to others: en-passant seems to be Latin for "the most arcane and obscure Chess rule ever devised that pretty much never comes up in real games."]

I'd thought about point values, and they're a bit tough to get right. By "right" I mean a useful guide to players. My rough draft system is for the dismounted pieces:

1 Pawn
2 Bishop
2 Knight
2 Rook
5 Queen

and double when mounted. This roughly equates the point values in orthodox chess, but I can't really test it.

Okay, the en-passant rules might affect a player's decision every 10-15 games, but I've only ever seen a Pawn captured en-passant once. Haven't played nearly as much as spaff, though.

I was thinking a bit more about that idea of putting the mounts on the front row. Haven't had a chance to actually playtest it that way yet, but it probably isn't as problematic as I initially feared.

1. If someone really wants to sacrifice a Charger just to capture a Pawn en-pasant, it's trading a piece to disrupt the opponent's opening sequence. Not as unbalanced as it first looked.

2. Getting a dismounted Knight out of the back row takes some work. Either the Knight's Pawn or the neighboring Bishop needs to get out of the way first. Of course, moving the Bishop requires moving a Pawn first. Getting the Knight onto a mount requires serious coordination:

a. First, clear a path for the Knight to even move.
b. Move the Bishop's or Rook's Pawn one space then dismount. Alternatively, dismount the King's/Queen's Pawn.
c. Move the Knight onto the empty mount.

This is considerably more complicated than mounting any other back-row piece: just dismount a Pawn and move the piece onto it next turn.

3. The King will probably remain dismounted in this version. That "useless" Jumper from the current rules actually gives the King the ability to poop an obstacle when fleeing check.

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Most efficient sequence I can think of at the moment to develop a Knight and Bishop under spaff's suggestion:
1. cP b2\b3
2. .B c1/b2
3. jP d2\d4
4. .N b1/d2

(The slashes aren't typos... the rulebook goes into how to record mounting and dismounting. \ indicates the piece moves leaving its mount behind, while / indicates moving onto an empty mount. A piece leaving one mount for another would use V.)

Thanks larienna, it looks like there was another message that didn't get posted here.

And there were a handful of suggestions on tweaking the rules for Pawns.

I really appreciate the feedback. To be clear though, I'd like this game to be as close as possible to vanilla chess with just the one significant change of using mounts... with few or zero special cases. This means leaving Pawns with their current weird movement abilities, and Kings hopefully obeying the same rules as everyone else.

Seems reasonable that a piece mounted on a Charger is worth more points than one mounted on a Jumper, though the exact values would only be a guess at this point. Rough idea: Jumper is 1.5x the base (round down) and Charger is 2x the base. So a Pawn is 1 point unless on a Charger; Bishop & Knight are 2, 3 or 4 points; Rook is 3, 4 or 6 points; Queen is 5, 8 or 10 points.

I could split hairs and say that a Charger extends a Pawn's movement but not its capture, but I'd rather not go there since it'd be a non-intuitive thing for the player to remember. Remember, anyone zipping their Pawn around on a Charger is basically sacrificing that valuable Charger.

For the King, even on a Charger he can't pass through check (I didn't make this up whole cloth; it's already part of the rules for castling). If someone is closing in on checkmate, this ought to severely restrict the King's movements (for example, he simply can't get past a Rook who is nearby or on a Charger). But prior to all that the King could slide all over the board. If this proves too hard to pin down, then forbidding the King from mounting any horse is acceptable. Might even include a Throne "mount" in the game box to keep the King at an appropriate height befitting his importance.

Restricting each side to four Chargers and four Jumpers sounds good, though there would be a fifth Charger in the box for those who want to use this set to replicate vanilla chess (Rooks, Bishops and Queen). If we further restrict Horseman's Chess to a deterministic setup with the middle four Pawns getting Jumpers and the outer ones getting Chargers, then we might not have to keep the King on foot. Players would probably have time to develop either the King or the Queen with a Charger before the armies engage.

Mounting opponent's horses can be done three ways. First, the mounts could be "gray" and open for anyone to use, but killed if their rider is captured. Second, they are "gray" but appropriated if the rider is captured by a dismounted opponent. Third, the are colored "black" and "white" yet open for anyone to use; they can be appropriated if the rider is captured by a dismounted piece of the mount's color. I think any of these makes the mounts less useful as obstacles, but I'm not sure how often that would actually come up during play. One scenario I definitely foresee is a mounted King leaving his mount behind to block check.

As for a Rook riding a horse, I'm imagining that piece as a stocky warrior wielding an oversized hammer. It turns out that, after using a plumed helm for the Knight, all of the back-row symbols are "hats" except the Rook. I can try to draw a bucket helm that has hints of crenelations on it.

I'm hoping (perhaps unreasonably) that this game might be purchased by someone familiar with chess but not the nuances of the chess variant scene. If the target market was chess variant geeks, I could just make up a name and summarize it completely as "W2 alone, WD on Jumper, WW on Charger." The only difficulty would be my non-standard use of the term "mount."

I'm not sticking close to vanilla chess out of "it's my baby" attachment, it's a calculated strategy to keep the game accessible to as broad an audience as possible. If a particular combination turns out to be fairly pointless (Bishop on Jumper, perhaps) then that's okay so long as the game as a whole is accessible and engaging.

And some player might just enjoy the aesthetic of a cleric in a ridiculous hat on a bucking bronco :-)

That's great. I know I said that the game needs to stick as close as possible to vanilla chess, but jettison any exceptions necessary to get your engine off the ground.

Although in the future I can see some special moves like castling implemented through bit boards (byte boards?) to establish the necessary relative positions of other pieces, en-passant is just irritating. The only trick I can think of is to have a Pawn's initial double-move leave behind an invisible piece in the skipped space, which can only be attacked by an enemy Pawn, and that vanishes the next turn.