I played 64 piece arrangements against each other, here's what happened.

I enjoy games where you get to pick your team or arrange your army before the start, and this lead me to take a look at how prearranged Chess pieces would look. Are good squares and good arrangements just good, or do arrangements turn into a giant game of rock, paper scissors? I decided to test this out with the following rules:

  1. Before the game players set up their pieces on their half of the board, with the King on the kingside (e1-h4) half, and without seeing the opposing setup.
  2. After revealing both setups, Black may flip their entire setup around the D#/Eb line. Knights can potentially hit the sixth rank on move 1, so Black needs this adjustment to avoid immediate involuntary surgery.

I made 64 arrangements and stuck them into a tournament where each arrangement faced nine opponents four times each. Once with White and a slightly stronger engine, once with White and the weaker engine, then both ways with Black as well. The top three finishers look very similar to each other, and overall the better performers show some expected trends.

  1. You want some pawns in the center. Most of the top performers occupy d4/e4 with pawns, and those that don't occupy these two squares at least back up one central pawn really well or stick pawns on d3/e3. I tried to make hypermodern work and when your opponent just jams two pawns on each central file that's too much. If you look in the middle rows of the graphic at Upgraded B Battery vs B Battery, advancing two pawns into the central squares and shifting the queen over one square leapfrogged literally half of the field, from 37th to 5th.
  2. You need some pawns in front of your king, who probably belongs somewhere on g/h 1/2. A properly defended centralized king still has to watch checks from two directions after lots of pawns trade off. g4 and h4 pawns also performed a lot better than I expected, fighting for space in front of the king.
  3. Between points 1 and 2, you're going to have some open files, probably on the queenside, and you might as well see if doubling your rooks hits something tender. Offsides finished 4th, it has nothing on d4 or e4, and its rooks share a rank instead of a file, but rook batteries on the a- or b-file earned a lot of cheap wins.
  4. I expected slapping a Knight on the 4th rank to lose games left and right to immediate PxN captures, but no, you can slap a Knight on a4 or b4. With Black getting a flip at the start of the game, White needs two well-positioned pawns to catch a single piece on the 4th rank on move 1. Committing to c4 and f4 just to catch a Knight on b5 can throw a setup out of whack if the Knight appears on a5 instead.
  5. Whenever I tried to make a setup that countered the best previous setups instead of just a "good setup," I produced something that lost lots of games to anything it wasn't specifically targeted to beat.

I don't know how close to "optimal" I came with the Honeycomb setups, but they beat the pants off most of my other ideas, and my attempt at hard countering them landed in the middle of the bottom row scoring 12/36. They look like good setup beats RPS. If someone thinks they have something that beats Honeycomb and also beats random weird stuff, I'm all ears.

64 different setups, or my attempt at knocking eval bot for a loop.