I am not being completely faithful to my dream as I'm describing it here. I'm filling in a lot of blanks and cutting out a lot of wacky calvinball style nonsense to try to get it to a more simple and intuitive form of the concept.
Fine Chess is played on a 40x40 grid of tiny squares, like a chessboard except each square is divided into 5x5. Each piece has a 5x5 footprint, and they start where they would on a normal chessboard.
The pieces move similarly to how they do in normal chess:
- The rook can slide any number of squares either horizontally or vertically.
- The bishop can move any number of squares diagonally. (and is no longer color locked!)
- The pawn can move forward like a rook up to 5 squares, or up to 10 squares on its first move. It can also capture forward like a bishop up to five squares diagonally.
- The queen can move like a rook or bishop.
- The king is not locked to any axis, and can jump freely up to 5 squares in each direction. (So it can move anywhere in the 15x15 region centered on itself.)
- The knight is hardest to explain. If you imagine the spots a chess knight can move, there are eight squares, each diagonally touching one other square. In fine chess, each of these diagonal pairs is treated as a short diagonal line from one to the other. The knight can jump to any point on these lines.
Additional rules about movement:
- A piece can not end its turn overlapping with another piece, unless it's capturing that piece.
- To capture, a piece must end its turn overlapping with an enemy piece by at least half of its footprint (13 squares).
- Sliding pieces (rooks, bishops, queens, pawns) can "squeeze" through gaps only if at no point along their slide do they overlap with other pieces by at least 13 squares at once. So, a rook can fit through two pieces 3 squares apart, but 2 squares apart is too tight. This rule allows bishops to still squeeze through diagonals.
- Remember, squeezing only lets you get through - you can't end your turn with pieces overlapping.
- The king must be able to slide exactly 10 squares to castle. (Squeezing would be allowed, except that if it needed to squeeze, the rook wouldn't be able to end its turn in the spot across the king. The rook can squeeze if castling queenside, though.)
- En passant works like this: if, on its first move, a pawn moves forward more than 5 squares, another pawn may capture it on the very next turn by capturing as though it had moved forwards exactly 5 squares instead.
- For checks and checkmates, keep in mind that a capture requires an overlap of at least half the piece's footprint. So, a queen may have line of sight to enemy king, but if it can't end its turn with such an overlap, the king is not in check.
Additional notes:
- I was really interested in this in my dream. But now that I'm awake I kind of don't want to play this ever. It seems like hell. Maybe I would try a less fine variant, with each square divided into 3x3 instead of 5x5.
- Now I'll list some of the weirder rules I cut for the sake of sanity:
- Certain regions of the board were shaded different colors and had various effects on pieces within those regions that I can't remember.
- Each player could, before the game started, draw a certain length of wall in their half of the board that pieces couldn't cross. I think it was like up to 35 units long or something? (It goes along the lines between squares, doesn't take up the squares themselves. You aren't allowed to draw a wall that separates the board into two or more non-contiguous regions.)
- When capturing a piece, if you didn't overlap it completely, you would only take a "chomp" out of it, removing the overlapping squares and modifying its footprint for the rest of the game. This is a real headache and I don't want to think about it anymore
