Pictures

§1.2 Cardboard tiles for crazyhouse (October 2024)

Capture and overturn any tile. It will reverse colour!

My set includes Spartan Chess or Spartan Mirror pieces, for playing Spartan Mirror crazyhouse (!) -- and even a crazyhouse version of proper Spartan Chess, if we decide on rules.

§1.3 Cardboard tiles for promotion in bughouse and crazyhouse (October 2024)

In bughouse and crazyhouse, when a promoted piece is captured it turns back into a pawn (so, take the pawn and remove the promotion tile).

Simple blank discs or objects such as bottle caps etc. can be used too, especially for the standard (queen) promotion -- see below, §1.8.

My set includes Seirawan and Spartan Chess pieces.

§1.4 Spartan cardboard tiles, including promotion tiles (October 2024)

§1.5 Spartan Chess (October 2024)

§1.6 Spartan Mirror (October 2024)

§1.7 Duck Chess, and... an invaded chessboard (October 2024)

This duck is a standard Duck Chess duck, though it looks like a lazy and sleepy crocodile. The sleep of a crocodile-looking Duck Chess duck then produces a monstrous invasion from 1990 Italian childhood.

§1.8 Metal round objects for promotion in bughouse and crazyhouse (March 2025)

A standard disc or pedestal-like object for the standard promotion (i.e. queen in standard-chess-based variants), or the only possible promotion (for example in shōgi). One of the pictures shows a promotion to knight too, with a knight cardboard tile -- see §1.3 above, Cardboard tiles for promotion in bughouse and crazyhouse. (The positions are not realistic.)

§1.9 My handmade set of shōgi, also known as Japanese chess (March 2025)

I have created a separate page, More pictures: my shōgi board and pieces -- click here.

§2 The kind of fairy chess piece symbols I like, with some personal proposals -- bad drawings of good symbols

§2.1 Standard pieces: examples of interchangeable alternatives for the king and the bishop

§2.2 Basic hybrid/compound fairy pieces, excluding the crowned ones

§2.3 Crowned fairy pieces (non-royal, if not stated otherwise)

Threefold hybrids: NRK, NBK -- I show only one example in my drawings.

§2.4 The xiangqi horse (X) and some related hybrids

Xiangqi horse; horse-rook hybrid (two interchangeable alternatives); horse-bishop hybrid (three interchangeable alternatives). The lower row gives winged symbols, in the style of Paradigm Chess30 -- a beautiful chess variant, where the only special piece is the xiangqihorse-bishop hybrid, aka Paradigm dragon.

Following the same patterns, one can easily compose the symbols for XQ and XK (and threefold hybrids too: XRK, XBK -- see §2.3 above).

Read section §4 of my web page On player-friendly piece design.

§2.5 Diacritics: royalness, half-royalness, peaceful-movement only, capturing-movement only

Diacritical signs are here coloured for greater clarity, but that's not necessary.

§2.6 Some examples of peaceful-movement only and/or capturing-movement only hybrids

The first two are examples of divergent pieces: there is no overlapping between the peaceful movements and the capturing movements, for either of them. The third is a normal rook with the special feature of peaceful king movements (that is peaceful ferz movements). The fourth is a knight that can also move as a queen when capturing.

See section §5 of my web page On player-friendly piece design.

§2.7 Some examples of (non-)royalness, etc.

See, again, sections §3 and §5 of  On player-friendly piece design.

The last example, here, is an unlikely and overcomplicated royal compound. (Note that a lot of different threefold and fourfold hybrids and symbols are possible, with peaceful-movement and/or capturing-movement rules -- among other things, the queen may be split into a rook and a bishop, as in this example.)

§3 Chinese chess and I, from the mid-nineties to present (2024)

§4 My tafl/hnefatafl boards (2024)