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King's Colour |
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Far far away, all the way into the late seventies, I made a Chad variant at Fanaat as a joke. It was based on 'the great switcharoo': pieces on the king's sub-grid would be rooks, the others would be bishops ... always and instantly. The king moves to a different checkered sub-grid and ... kazangoo! Very funny. I remember playing it against Wim van Weezep and White could give check on the first move, but Black could interpose. We played one or two games but then I buried it because Chad already had HexChad as it's companion. I decided to revive the game, now that HexChad is down the drain and manual play with the constant switching of pieces can easily be foregone. But as it turned out I had used the wrong size, because on the board that I sent Ed White could not only give check on the very first move, but checkmate. So I decided to rethink the whole thing. The original board had the castles situated in opposing corners, without a free line in the back. I'm not even sure why that was, but Ed suggested to push them inwards (as with HexChad, actually) because that would place both kings on the same sub-grid, inherently together with the rooks, while all bishops were on the other two grids, unable to give check on the first move. So that's what we did, but not only that. I had slept on it and decided that the game would feature too little power to force a checkmate and could in theory go on forever. It still can of course because of cooperative cycles, but hardly in actual play because I introduced promotion, as in the parent game. You can see it in the diagram, a checkmate by Black, by the way. Enschede, March 2021 christian freeling |