Recent research, or analysis sites, about some chess variants?

Question

I would appreciate some links to recent (within the last 8 years) chess variant analyses and research. As to standard chess it seems like the source code for a lot of the computer chess programs usually contains a new tidbit gleaned from various pruning and optimization techniques. What's extremely difficult to find is new insight into games such as Glinskis Hexagonal Chess or Capablanca Chess or even Millenium 3d Chess.

[Cameron Browne has done a lot of work on connection games and of course there are the small short games of no chance in the "Games of No Chance" books containing various papers on games; but, I'm really looking for some heavy information w.r.t. the above 3 chess variants.]

Answer 1

I'm not sure if this is the sort of item you might be interested in, but Dave McCooey generated complete (pawnless) 4-man tablebases for hexagonal chess on the 91-"square" board, and has a full tabulation of the results; since there are no pawns involved, the analysis there is applicable both to Glinski's hexagonal chess that you mention, as well as McCooey's own version (which differs from Glinski's where pawn movement is concerned). McCooey went beyond providing tablebases for the usual chess pieces, and also included a great variety of fairy pieces, including the Chancellor and Archbishop (called there the Pegasus) of Capablanca chess.

Beyond the hexagonal chess board, he also created some 4-man and 5-man tablebases involving fairy pieces on the standard 8x8 chessboard. Those results involving only standard chess pieces along with Chancellors and Archbishops/Pegasi are somewhat relevant to endgames for Capablanca chess. Since Capablanca chess is played on a 10x8 board, the results aren't directly applicable to that game, but they are suggestive of how things would play out on the 10x8 board, and in any case they are directly applicable to Seirawan chess, which uses the same piece set as Capablanca chess -- with yet different names: Chancellor = Elephant, Archbishop = Hawk -- but is played on the standard board.