Larry has been experimenting for almost twenty years with a class of games he calls indirection chess, of which Capriccio is the latest and most refined incarnation. Actually Larry now has a version which is slightly different from the one described here, and when I last heard was at last thinking of looking for a publisher. The name of the game suggests the capricious way the powers of the pieces fluctuate in the course of a game. There are two armies, Black and White.
Color is used to distinguish types of pieces as well as their affiliation.
Larry has made a beautiful set in which the pieces look something like Trivial Pursuit pieces with knobs coming up from the center. The knobs, colored, are permanently attached, and the pieces accomodate wedge-shaped finials in the different colors which can be taken out and exchanged for others as needed. In the diagram above I try to suggest such an arrangement, in pieces that all start the game with two finials in their own color. A piece s powers of movement do not come from the color of its permanent mark. Hence the powers of the pieces are not the same throughout the game, and part of the strategy is to plan for your pieces to have the powers they will need when you need them.