Chess is already very difficult, combinatorially. Chess players learn patterns with the current pieces. Those patterns include patterns that work both locally a

Chess is already very difficult, combinatorially. Chess players learn patterns with the current pieces. Those patterns include patterns that work both locally and globally. When learning a particular pattern, chess players typically can generalize that pattern to other cases. (This is what tactics training is all about. You're almost never going to find the exact same pattern that you learn in tactics training in the real world but tactics training will help you recognize similar patterns.) New pieces are going to give you new patterns you have to learn. But ranks, files, and diagonals are not going away. New pieces will likely be a bishop-knight combo piece and a rook-knight combo piece as in Seirawan chess. Therefore, they will still have common patterns you can recognize. The larger board is not a non-issue but it's not anywhere near as drastic a change as you're making it out to be. Most tactics in chess don't make use of the fact that the board is 8x8 rather than 10x10. They'll work in both boards.