Adam wrote:black having to devote moves to preventing perpetual check affects game balance. It may turn out that the balance is better when black has to deal with those types of threat.
That's true... if black can now leave third-ranks unattended, safe in the knowledge that white can't use the threat of perpetual check against him, that leaves black in a
much stronger position, maybe too strong. On the other hand, maybe with enough time and practice, new techniques peculiar to copenhagen hnefatafl will emerge. For instance, I think white may learn to attack the edges much more, exploiting rule #2 to restore the balance?
Experience with hnefatafl has shown repeatedly, that one side has discovered a tactic that really works, and seems for a while unanswerable (thereby unbalancing the game), but after a few more games, a countermove is discovered, and the balance shifts over the other way, (with the words "
NEXT LEVEL" flashing across the screen, as it were.) This
levelling up has happened several times already, just as it must have happened early in the history of chess or any other game of sufficient complexity.
My own feeling is (and it's just a feeling) that we should keep rule #3 unless it turns out to be seriously bad, because games which end in a perpetual check draw are disappointing anyway, so the threat of perpetual check draw is the threat of inflicting disappointment, which is bad gamesmanship, like saying "you have to make such and such a move, otherwise I will make the whole game really disappointing, and there won't be anything you can do about it!" But we need more testing WITH the rule #3 in place, before we know if the balance is badly affected.
MaC wrote:Maybe it would be instructive with some crust-Adam test games on this, where white in the test (or black) must force a perpetual moves situation to win? Just like the earlier test of the Monstrous forts.
Yeah I'm up for that too. Someone, give Adam and me a research grant