Elongated Explosions

2026 - Birthday Submission Special

I created this because "THAT WAS INSPIRED BY MAGIC DETONATION I NEED AN ATOMIC VARIANT WAAAAA".

But this is totally not Magic Detonation, because "there are no spells lol".

And yes, I recorded the entire variant creation process, and I might create a movie about this. We'll see what happens after this gets verdicted.

I think you can call this a revision of Camel of the Hill, which fixes the issue of the camel being too easy to attack, along with the lack of gamerules or an interesting concept making the variant feeling un-unique. This was also inspired by Delaware Chess, or 'Chess but you have to get your king to the other side of the board', a really fun variant that I would like to see implemented in the future.

This differs to Magic Detonation because of the different types of strategies. While Magic Detonation relies on strategic spell placement and the use of some beginner-unfriendly gamerules such as the Atomic-Petrified combination, this variant features more conventional Atomic gameplay, being similar to regular Atomic chess, but with a different piece set allowing for fun tactical moves such as forks and pins. Shoutout to @wizardrunner for the awesome testing game, as well as being 2nd place in the Rookmate platinum variant arena!

This variant has a variety of strategies involving piece development:

- You can carefully choose which pieces to develop first to find a safe square and gain space in your opponent's territory, loosely inspired by Discord's Ghosty Bot Area minigame.

- The sergeants can be used as a versatile attacking and defending piece. One aspect I like is the promotion rank at 9th, increasing the value of the sergeants despite them being the maine defenders. And yes, I tried last rank promotion, but that was not as fun and strategic.

- It is not rare for players to sacrifice their pieces on the sergeants. This is because sergeants can gain valuable space in their territory, leading to sacrifices to prevent promotion or mate. Additionally, back-rank pieces can be sacrificed to damage the opposing pawn structure, creating holes that can be taken advantage of.

- Sideways pawns makes it easier to develop the long-range pieces, such as the chancellor or the elephant.

And finally, I believe this variant is great for beginners. This is due to the lack of gamerules that add unneccessary complexity, such as Fatal, Fog, etc. The gamerule choice of Atomic, King of the Hill and Sideways Pawns, creates a familiar feeling for beginners, as those gamerules are straight forwards and popular. Additionally, the piece set is simple due to the pieces having simple movements (knight hybrids, alibaba, regular chess pieces) that beginners tend to master in my testing games. And yes, the board is conventionally rectangular. Overall, I feel like this is a great introduction to fairy pieces, and I hope this either gets accepted, or at least, close to an acception.

If you managed to read all this, thank you for reading, and 45.