Charmed

If this gets accepted, please use the stylized version of the title: ✧𝓒𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓶𝓮𝓭✧.

'Delve into the fantasy realm in a game of sorcery and strategy.'

"This was a nightmare to submit." - chye3mc on L Bozo.

Spell Chess is, for some reason, seen as an "I made this in 2 seconds" game rule, and the fact that the position looks like default FFA doesn't help either.

Yes, jumping a corner wall is an intended strategy. Ideal tc is 5/8, but the game I set as final is 10/5.

Here is a quick rundown on why I made this: FFA Spell Chess doesn't exist yet, so I made it my goal to create an FFA Spell Chess variant.

Cards are greyed out for 8-8-7-7, while spell lock is 4 (?). I might be wrong, but I believe there is a bug in Spell Duration, where the duration is affected by the number of players remaining.

EDIT: I'm stupid, "turns" is how many times it reaches your turn. It just seems shorter because there are less moves made between your turns.

The opening is mostly pawns and sometimes a few XiangQi horses. The middlegame heavily depends on dragons, generals, XiangQi horses, and knights. The rooks show their power in the endgame.

Strategies:

1. If you have very few pieces close together, move them into a 3x3 area and freeze yourself, giving yourself +40 by stalemate. This is risky, however, because one of your opponents might throw in a check, stealing the +40.

2. Your opponent just froze another opponent's pieces. Freeze your opponent's pieces so that you can attack that area.

And a lot more.

Okay, I'm going to go over piece choice now.

Pawns: Kick dragons and block their diagonal threats, then promote at the 9th rank in the late middlegame and endgame.

XiangQi Horses: Block threats and defend the hill, while scooping up material whenever possible.

Knights: Block threats, defend the back rank, and cover the hill if possible.

General: Block threats, defend back rank, then become an attacker later.

Dragons: Attack your opponents with your powerful combination of bishop and XiangQi horse.

Rooks: Protect the king at all costs, then come out to attack in the late-middlegame and endgame.

King: Survive and reach the hill in the late endgame.

Huge shoutout to MegaThief for teaching me how to grey out the cards at the start.

Since testing this variant was very hard, I'm also going to give a shoutout to all of my testers:

Nhung-Hoang, Nikok2010, UnorthodoxedOpening_Pawn, Tim-A11, Davidmihaiionita, DuoChess2013, Williamliu12345, Tonglinzhuo1, AngeLynn15, Giaison, Christopherop1, VishTheFish771, XEllington, michaelmerz7, XXHomam7777, Rafael1310, BluePlusSymbol, Nyutixbrother, Wolyn, DestructiveGuy, JackityJackJack, NoWellOkay, and Dan-Kyu_System.