Today I took another step in the long dark road to grognardery. Inspired by my recent readthrough of Mike Carr's Dawn Patrol, I went to the library and checked out some history books: The First Air War, 1914-1918 by Lee Kennett and The Red Baron, Rochthofen's autobiography.

And here it is...


The Queen in Enchian Chess is a color-bound leaper. This same piece can be found in the Chess Variants Piececlopedia as the Alibaba.

Hopefully, this really is my final enochian chess graphic.

Re-reading your source material is a good idea
So I'm not done with graphics for the Enochian Chess essay. I re-read the rules of the game this morning, something I hadn't done in months, and I re-discovered that Queens don't move as orthodox queens, so I'll need a graphic showing their special movement. Also, I realized that my "concourse of queens" graphic depicts an illegal move.

Last Enochian chess graphic
Now all I have to do is finish the research and write the page.



This fellow is the Black Knight in a traditional Enochian set. I colored him myself. The guidelines for doing so are not complete, so I had to make a few guesses.

This will probably hose the screen width...


Here's the first draft of an initial array for a chess variant that combines the more interesting features of 3 well-known large board variants: Omega Chess, Tamerlan Chess (a historical variant that has also been called Shatranj Kamil and Shatranj Al-Kabil), and Gothic Chess. Gothic Chess is an improvement upon Capablanca's Chess, which itself is a re-invention of Bird's Chess and/or an older variant by Carrera.

The rules for this variant basically write themselves. The "pawn of X" promotion mechanic comes from Tamerlane and Chaturanga. The other new pieces are directly adopted from Gothic and Omega chess. The only real questions are the castling rules, any special rules regarding the wizards' corner spaces, and the pawn of king promotion. For the latter, the easiest solution would be for the pawn of kings to promote to Men, i.e. non-royal kings. I am also considering using the Prince, which is a similar piece but in this case the prince would also have to be captured or mated to insure victory.

So here's a look at the color scheme of a traditional Enochian Chess board:



Doesn't look very helpful as a gameboard, does it?

Finished up the other seven starting boards for Enochian chess. While working on them I got some ideas for a couple other chess variants:

Tamerlane's Pawns: Orthodox 8x8 board and array, except that each pawn can only promote to one kind of piece. The pawn in front of the queen promotes to a queen, the pawn in front of a knight promotes to a knight, etc. The pawn in front of the king promotes to a prince, which moves and takes like a king. If a prince is in play it must be eliminated before the king can be checked.

Tamerlane's Gothic Omega (working title): Combine Gothic and Omega Chess with Tamerlane-style pawns.

Good News and Bad News
Good News: My contest entry is up at ChessVariants.com. (I've really got to get my HTML skills up to snuff. The coding on the page is terrible.)

Bad News: Last night I tried working on Zillions file for a modest variant using Crooks instead of Rooks in an otherwise orthodox chess game. I get getting an "out of memory" error, even after a restart. If my computer is virused I'll kick myself for not updating the virus protection.

Here's my first graphic depicting an orthodox chess-style interpetation of Enochian Chess as a game. There are seven other possible initial arrays. I also need to do some examples of the "concourse of the bishops" special case and some graphics giving examples of an authentic Enochian piece and board.

Back from lunch.
As I guessed, I had misread the passage describing the various initial set-ups for Enochian Chess. I had thought there were 2 possibly arrays, when in fact there are eight. Seems I am nowhere near down with my graphics for my article. This sort of confusion is one of the key reasons why I want to write a gamer-oriented description of Enochian Chess. If the text wasn't so interested in talking about the "Earth of Fire" board or whatever it might be easier to see the chess game underneath all the magickal stuff.