Dragon Chess, a new Chess Variant by Keith Williams
Posted: Tue Mar 28, 2017 10:44 pm
Hello,
My name is Keith Williams, and thanks to Dr. Zied Haddad, I'm able to share my new variant of chess. I'd like to explain how I developed it over the past couple of years. It started from Omega Chess created by Daniel Macdonald from Toronto, Canada, back in 1998. He enlarged the board to 10 x 10 with 4 corner squares and added 2 new chess pieces, the Champion (C) and Wizard (W). You can go to his site to see how they move:
http://omegachess.com/
The Champion and Wizard added a new dimension to the game, but the Knight lost value and the board seemed to big for the pieces. When I added the "Knighted" Bishop and Rook from Seirawan chess, the Hawk (B+N) and Elephant (R+N), the game played better. Of course, the Queen had to be Knighted to the Amazon Queen or Dragon to stay supreme, but the value of the regular pieces still didn’t match the board size and the game was still unbalanced. When the House of Staunton came out with the Musketeer variant pieces by Dr. Zied Haddad, I replaced the Champion with the Cannon and the Wizard with the Unicorn. I changed their movement slightly from the original Omega pieces to give them more power.
Now, the regular pieces (B, N, R) needed more power, but I wanted to keep this variant as close as possible to regular chess, so it would be easy for players to quickly adapt to it. So, I "Crowned" the Bishop and Rook to the Archbishop (B+K) and the Fortress (R+K), which seemed like the perfect match. Then replaced the Knight with the Leopard, which also helped avoid confusing it with the similar looking Unicorn. Finally, all the pieces had a good balance of power. Later, when I showed Dr. Haddad my variant, he was gracious enough to allow me to use these pieces in a different way than in Musketeer chess.
I’ve played over 100 games with a few other people using this variant and we all agree that it plays very well, with good balance and complexity. When I first started playing this variant the tactical positions were getting so complex, I jokingly said it was causing me cerebral edema; hence the name Cerebral (edema) Chess or CE-Chess. Later the game was renamed Dragon Chess.
You can play Dragon Chess online at: http://musketeerchess.net/games/cerebral/
If you'd like to download a free instructional poster (24” x 36”) with diagrams of how the chess pieces move and see photos of the chess set,
go to my shared G-drive folder: Cerebral (edema) Chess https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... GdvR0M5SzA
I hope you enjoy playing this variant!
Sincerely,
Keith
Cerebral.Chess@gmail.com
My name is Keith Williams, and thanks to Dr. Zied Haddad, I'm able to share my new variant of chess. I'd like to explain how I developed it over the past couple of years. It started from Omega Chess created by Daniel Macdonald from Toronto, Canada, back in 1998. He enlarged the board to 10 x 10 with 4 corner squares and added 2 new chess pieces, the Champion (C) and Wizard (W). You can go to his site to see how they move:
http://omegachess.com/
The Champion and Wizard added a new dimension to the game, but the Knight lost value and the board seemed to big for the pieces. When I added the "Knighted" Bishop and Rook from Seirawan chess, the Hawk (B+N) and Elephant (R+N), the game played better. Of course, the Queen had to be Knighted to the Amazon Queen or Dragon to stay supreme, but the value of the regular pieces still didn’t match the board size and the game was still unbalanced. When the House of Staunton came out with the Musketeer variant pieces by Dr. Zied Haddad, I replaced the Champion with the Cannon and the Wizard with the Unicorn. I changed their movement slightly from the original Omega pieces to give them more power.
Now, the regular pieces (B, N, R) needed more power, but I wanted to keep this variant as close as possible to regular chess, so it would be easy for players to quickly adapt to it. So, I "Crowned" the Bishop and Rook to the Archbishop (B+K) and the Fortress (R+K), which seemed like the perfect match. Then replaced the Knight with the Leopard, which also helped avoid confusing it with the similar looking Unicorn. Finally, all the pieces had a good balance of power. Later, when I showed Dr. Haddad my variant, he was gracious enough to allow me to use these pieces in a different way than in Musketeer chess.
I’ve played over 100 games with a few other people using this variant and we all agree that it plays very well, with good balance and complexity. When I first started playing this variant the tactical positions were getting so complex, I jokingly said it was causing me cerebral edema; hence the name Cerebral (edema) Chess or CE-Chess. Later the game was renamed Dragon Chess.
You can play Dragon Chess online at: http://musketeerchess.net/games/cerebral/
If you'd like to download a free instructional poster (24” x 36”) with diagrams of how the chess pieces move and see photos of the chess set,
go to my shared G-drive folder: Cerebral (edema) Chess https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... GdvR0M5SzA
I hope you enjoy playing this variant!
Sincerely,
Keith
Cerebral.Chess@gmail.com