That actually looks pretty promising, but seems like it will have major balance issues.
To me the trick is preserve some kind of backward compatibility with chess while finding a way to increase the strategic content. Ironically stuff like increasing the board size like in 3D chess variants, can actually reduce the strategic content by reducing the role of long-term factors like pawn structure.
EDIT: I can see some combination of the game's features -- particularly the king "touchdown" -- sort of working against the strategic content. IE people just playing gimmick openings to sneak their king across.
Those kinds of "gimmick" openings don't work well once people know the game. It's like losing to the 4-turn checkmate: it only happens once or twice before you start looking for it and planning against it.
Yeah but this game has like 10 times as many openings so it will take much longer to learn them.
The reason why memorization is a problem in chess isn't because there aren't enough openings/endgames to remember, it's because most players need to memorize certain patterns to reach a certain level of effectiveness, because they would rarely be able to solve those problems over the board.
So the solution to the chess memorization problem isn't necessarily more openings and more complexity, which ironically could just INCREASE opening importance. Rather I think the idea is to increase the importance and depth of long term strategic factors like pawns, the sort of understanding of which grows over time and doesn't lend itself to rote memorization.
To me the trick is preserve some kind of backward compatibility with chess while finding a way to increase the strategic content. Ironically stuff like increasing the board size like in 3D chess variants, can actually reduce the strategic content by reducing the role of long-term factors like pawn structure.
EDIT: I can see some combination of the game's features -- particularly the king "touchdown" -- sort of working against the strategic content. IE people just playing gimmick openings to sneak their king across.