Reversion: When a Commanding King Falls

Most of the striking rules in Enochian chess concern what happens when a King falls. An enemy takes your King and your whole army freezes into inert terrain. Your ally takes your King instead and your army fights on under his command. A living King who reaches his ally's throne takes command there, and if that army was frozen, it wakes. All of these can stack, and the moment they start stacking you need one more rule to keep the board honest. That rule is reversion.

What command means here

Ordinarily each of the four armies answers to its own King. Two things can change that. The first is the rescue capture: when a King stands in check, his own ally may capture him rather than leave him to an enemy. A King taken this way is not destroyed, he is held in trust, and his army keeps fighting under the ally's command instead of freezing. The second is throne seizure: a living King who marches to his ally's corner takes command of that army outright, and a frozen army reactivates when he arrives. Either way one player is now moving two armies, and one of those armies is not his own. See the rescue capture and throne seizure.

The two outcomes of reversion

Now capture that commanding King. The army he was commanding does not simply carry on, and it does not transfer to whoever took him. It reverts, and there are exactly two outcomes. If that army's own King is still alive, the army reverts to his command and keeps playing as a normal army again. If its own King is gone, the army freezes again, returning to the inert state it was in before the commander arrived to wake it. Everything hinges on whether the army has a living King of its own to fall back on.

Put plainly: a borrowed army is only as alive as the borrower. Reviving a frozen force by throne seizure is a real gain, but it is a gain held on a thread, because the thread is the life of the King who walked over there. Lose him and the army you resurrected turns back to stone in the same instant.

Why the rule has to exist

Without reversion, the game would have loose ends. An army whose King was captured but which had been woken by an ally would have no one in charge once that ally fell, and a player could otherwise inherit forces indefinitely through a chain of captures. Reversion closes that. Command always traces back to a living King, either the army's own or a borrower's, and when neither exists the army is frozen. It is the bookkeeping rule that lets the flashier mechanics coexist without ambiguity, and on this site the server applies it the same way every time, so nobody has to arbitrate.

How to play around it

Reversion turns a commanding King into the single most valuable target on the board. If your opponent has seized a throne and is running two armies, you are no longer looking for a fair trade. You are looking for that King, because taking him does double work: it removes a King you need anyway, and it strips an entire army back to its own devices or back into ice. Conversely, if you are the one commanding two armies, understand that you have concentrated your alliance's whole position into one piece. Walk him carefully, keep him off colors an enemy Queen can reach, and remember that check is judged for him exactly as it is for any King. See check and the color-bound pieces.

Where it sits in the ending

None of this ends a game by itself. An alliance wins the moment both enemy Kings have been taken and the field is held, so reversion is a mechanic of the middle and late game rather than a victory condition. It is the reason a position can swing twice in three moves: a frozen army wakes, its rescuer is captured, and it freezes again with nothing having moved on that side of the board. For the endings themselves, read how you win and draws, where a fully locked board is one of the four drawing conditions.

Keep reading

Read the two ways command is borrowed in throne seizure and the rescue capture, then see what freezing actually does in frozen armies.