Wanted to see this be successful! I love chess and roguelikes, but I found stalemate and insufficient material around 1/3 of boards before progressing any further. Could be aided with a few procedural suggestions:
Check that spawning pieces have at least one potential move on the board before spawn (Bishops sometimes get stuck on little islands early in the game)
Guarantee each island connects to the boat with at least two tiles (the one tile often bottlenecks out bishops and makes it extremely annoying to shuffle pieces)
Prohibit light-square bishops from spawning the first three days
I'm pretty confident most day 1-3 stales would be prevented by a few tweaks
Good ideas, I've actually already tweaked the island generation so that it doesn't do those one wide bottle neck bishop traps at all in the early levels and lowers the chance of them later on too. Only dark square bishops on early levels would be an easy addition and will indeed fix quite a lot of the problems. And forcing the raft to connect to at least two squares on the board would indeed make it feel better later on when you have more pieces on play.