my guess is that if you move forward, while your opponent levels up his pieces, you'll get slaughtered. you'll have less mobile pieces and be more spread out.

my guess is that if you move forward, while your opponent levels up his pieces, you'll get slaughtered. you'll have less mobile pieces and be more spread out. so both sides will level up. then they can't move anything very easily. move it forward and it's defended less times. meanwhile it's closer to your opponent, so attacked more times. so they level up the back row of pieces too. capturing to cause trades isn't obviously useful. so level up all the way to 7 in back. the front row only needs 6. only leave a couple 1's. probably two of them. then, finally, the side that moves first starts the capturing, and either wins or draws, dunno. if there was ever a chance for the guy moving second to initiate trades to his advantage, the guy who moved first could have set up the same thing a move earlier and done it first. not being very fair isn't the end of the world though. one of my favorite chess variants, Wild 5, is quite unfair to black. but that's ok, if you win a larger percentage of your black games than your opponent, you can win the series of games. the symmetry is the main problem, and lack of incentive to advance. game will probably turn out boring.