A note on Chrysalis' chess skills · 5:57pm Jul 30th, 2012
If you haven't emulated the game between Celestia and Chrysalis, then I'm proud of your possession of a life; if you're planning to, however, it is worthy to note that the Equestrian en passant, as I depict it, is only vaguely similar to the actual rule of en passant. Any pawn can capture any pawn laterally without moving to its spot, taking the pawn in passing. Why, you ask? Why make fake rules? Because it produces more drama, because the word 'en passant' sounds nice, because I can't bother to simulate actual en passant in my head while I'm busy writing and because the en passant équestre is actually pretty fun to play with.
It is worthwhile to note that while Celestia isn't very especially gifted at chess, Chrysalis is quite obviously not simply losing, but deliberately losing; she throws her pieces onto Celestia's with the objective to lose as many as possible and pauses to grab exactly a single piece: the queen. This is more of a coincidence than anything - Chrysalis had been put in check, after all.
On a side-note, I wonder how chess strategy would become awesomer if losing one's king made all of one's pawns become queens and the victory conditions were to capture all pawns, every other rule being the same. What intricate plans would players construct to make sure that capturing their king would be the only possible move? What enormous conspiracies of suicidality would the talented player conjure?
I've really got to try playing chess again one of these days.
dl.dropbox.com/u/31471793/FiMFiction/emoticons/lolface_Celestia.png
> If you haven't emulated the game between Celestia and Chrysalis, then I'm proud of your possession of a life
Oops: http://chesspo.st/G4zG
I turned out it was doable without changing any rules. One hour wasted, but it was worth it.
Now I'll let someone else find moves that lead to that position.
If victory conditions were to capture all pawns, and killing the king would turn them into queens, then the obvious solution would be to hunt down all the pawns without focusing on the king. That really wouldn't work. You wouldn't consciously kill a piece that is nonessential to winning if it meant making the game harder. So, neither side would go after the king. However, since the pawns are on the front lines, it would make for an interesting strategy to conserve the pawns, since they can only move forwards and not backwards.
And, if you want to play chess again, Funorb.com by Jagex has a Chess game on the website you can play, either against AI or other players online. It's also got a refresher course in the rules. I'd be willing to play a game like that with you; there aren't house rules, but we can make it so that whoever loses all their pawns must forfeit the match. We'd still have to deal with the whole 'in check' thing, but that adds just another depth of strategy. Of course, you'd have people want to cheat to gain a rating, but that's what the unrated matches are for.
Or, you could ask a computer programmer to do it for you. I'm sure that's possible, it wouldn't take too much tweaking from a normal chess game. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that (at this point in my life). But, it does sound like a very interesting take on chess.