Flashback to 2005-04-02: My Very Own Chess Variant

(Behold my 18-year old self back when I created a chess variant involving an augmented knight. This is from my old blog, and I'm reproducing it here with just a few minor tweaks, because I'm still sort of proud of this creation.    -Present Day Francis)

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Yesterday, I was thinking about a very unique kind of chess piece: the knight. Technically, the knight is a (2,1) leaper, meaning, it moves two squares in one direction, then one square in a perpendicular direction (see black dots in picture); and it can "leap" over pieces. So, as I was saying, I was thinking about the knight, then I suddenly had the urge to improve it (or to use the chess variation lingo, "augment it"). What if, I asked myself, there was a chess variant where the knight is an (n, n-1) leaper? It could still move like the orthodox knight (i.e. n = 2), but it would be far more powerful.

(The knight as an (n, n-1) leaper.)

Powerful. That's the word. I realized that such a piece was simply too powerful for serious players to like. Imagine a piece that could leap over any number of pieces to land on almost the opposite side of the board, attacking at a maximum of 24 squares (near the center) and a minimum of 14 (on an edge). Then imagine four of those pieces on a single chessboard. The words "cheap" and "overkill" come to mind. Basically, the only way for my idea to be acceptable is to limit this augmented knight somehow...But what would be an elegant way of doing this?