Chess question, from SMBC webcomic

[JeenLeen]

In this comic -- http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pro...w-chess-pieces -- some joke Chess pieces are introduced.

I was thinking about how incredibly powerful the Bureaucrat one could be, since it effectively means you can skip your turn. While in general this gives too much agency to your opponent, this effectively saves you in cases when any move will put you into check, so you could force your opponent to try to get closer to you but hope that allows you to counter him.

But I'm not great at chess, so I don't trust my opinion.
So, to any of you chess players, how profound would it be to substitute a pawn or two for bureaucrats?
(Feel free to comment on the other pieces in the comic, too.)

NOTE: I just realized bureaucrat says it can only move from its starting position to its starting position, i.e., it can never move... so that's not as impressive as I thought, but I still appreciate any comments.

[Geno9999]

The Wilderness Preserver sounds a bit broken, since all it has to do is run around your King and now you can never be in check.

[Rakaydos]

The Wilderness Preserver sounds a bit broken, since all it has to do is run around your King and now you can never be in check.

Dont even need to run it around, just put the king between the WP and a wall.
Also, only a knight can ever kill it.

[Hazyshade]

So the Bureaucrat is an interesting piece but probably an equilibrium-breaker. It gets you out of Zugzwang, which is a good thing, but it also gets you out of stalemate, which is a bad thing - it means you lose certain endgames that you could otherwise draw. The net effect would be neutral, except for the fact that you don't get to decide whether you're in Zugzwang/Stalemate-Avoidance Mode or Normal Mode at a given time. Your opponent makes that decision for you, by either capturing your Bureaucrat or leaving it on the board. Since it's completely inert, you can't sacrifice it, because you can't compel your opponent to capture it.

The Bishop-kicker's "Move like a King" ability is more useful than its Bishop-kicking ability. A King with no special game-ending significance is a Mann, which is a useful minor piece on a par with a knight. The most significant use of its bishop-kicking power will be to convert a light-squared bishop to a dark-squared bishop and vice versa, to enable it to reach a different set of 32 squares. I'd guess that would make bishop strategy less complex and rich. You don't have to worry about the implications of trading off your dark-squared bishop if you can just make a new one. Colour-converting enemy bishops is probably not going to be a factor; they're too fast.

The Wilderness Preserver is obviously a game-breaker; the weaker player will fence off their King and claim an automatic draw.

The Communist rules are confusing, because in general you can't remove your own pieces from the game. If we understand that to mean that you can simply take the Communist off the board and activate Checkers Mode, I think that will have a surprisingly small effect on gameplay. Your pieces will suddenly become a threat to anything diagonally in front of them - but most of your pieces are already a threat to things diagonally in front of them, to the point where only a careless opponent would leave pieces diagonally in front of yours. So Checkers Mode is going to be three turns of pointlessly shuffling around in the backfield. The Communist is almost certainly better off staying on the board as a regular bishop.

[Voidhawk]

What happens if you advanced a bishop/rook to the opponent's back row, then activate your Communist? Can you say "King-me" to the bishop? What happens to the king'd bishop when the game turns back into chess?

Tradionally in checkers, you use taken pieces to King other pieces. If you King a bishop with a rook, does it become a queen? If it becomes a King, does the opponent need to take one or both to win?