MedievalChess7949 wrote: ↑Tue Feb 04, 2025 2:08 am
Hey, thanks for the feedback.
I am thinking in automatic promotion in the move 22, if the pieces have not been promoted previously. What you think?
This might just be a matter of personal taste, but I dislike rules that make something happen on a specific move number. It sounds unnatural. Sometimes a game develops quickly, sometimes slowly, so the move number doesn't really mean anything. Much better to trigger things by events happening in the game.
I also don't see the point of rules that artificially delay the introduction of the new pieces. What is the point of that, how does a forced initial absence of the pieces make the game better? Introducing pieces during the game seems like patchwork anyway; ideally all pieces are present from the beginning. It is just an inelegant fix for having too many pieces for too small a board.
Yet many methods for this have already been tried and considered acceptable. One of the best known is gating as in Seirawan Chess, where you can optionally make a piece that you start with 'in hand' on a square evacuated by a backrank piece that moves for the first time (in the same turn). In Musketeer Chess something similar happens, except that you have to decide in advance 'from under' which piece the introduced piece will appear. One usually indicates that by placing the piece to introduce directly behind the square where it will appear. (I.e. on 'rank 0' or 'rank 9'. This requires a special prelude to the game before people can start moving, which is another thing I dislike.)
There are also variants where the extra pieces start in hand, and you can drop them on any empty square on your back rank as a turn. And there is a method where the extra pieces start on extra squares beyond the edge of the normal board (but so close that with their regular move they can enter the board). As soon as such an extra square is evacuated, it simply disappears, and moves to it are no longer possible.
What can be said of all these methods is that at least they are very straightforward.