Comments by JorgKnappen
And the use of RNF and BNW in Pocket Mutation Chess by Michael Nelson predates all of this, just their names a purely technical there (SuperCardinal and SuperChancellor). But I agree, these pieces play well on big boards.
Here is one genuine German Franz Tressan from Verden an der Aller: https://portal.dnb.de/opac.htm?method=simpleSearch&cqlMode=true&query=idn%3D110743078X
My pieces are free to reuse and I feel flattered that you like them.
What has happened to the diagrams here? They show 10x19 boards with a lot of blue non-squares to me.
This green/white layout looks good and has no annoying flaws.
I don't like the khaki/smoke scheme and I think this can be pinned to the following two factors:
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It does not from a well-defined board boundary on the present background colour (this is probably easy to cure with an outline)
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The colour difference between the interior of a white piece and a light board square is just noticeable, but not really a contrast. This does not look right.
While adding some tags here and there, I am thinking of tagging some more square boards and I need agreeable names for that tags.
Two are quite clear:
16x16 hexadecimal (from Greek)
20x20 vigesimal (from Latin)
But what about the other numbers 11, 13, 14, 15, and 18 (I leave out 17 and 19 just now, they are probably too odd)?
I'm thinking of
11x11 onzenal (from French)
13x13 treizenal (also from French)
14x14 quatorzenal (again from French)
15x15 femtenal (from the metric prefix "femto" 10^{-15}, ultimately from Danish 15)
18x18 attenal (from "atto" 10^{-18}, ultimately from Danish 18)
What do you think?
@Georgi Markov
Thanks for your publication on Sultansspiel and Kaiserspiel, and special thanks for publishing it in an open access journal. Now I finally know where that ominous "Ludwig Tressau" comes from.
However, I think that the common publishing place Leipzig is not suitable to draw far-reaching conclusions: At that time, Leipzig was the hub of German book publication and had the largest concentration of publication houses all over Germany. Also, Ludwig is the most probable expansion of the initial L. and may be an interpolation by Oettinger. The second most probable expansion would be Louise or Luise, a feminine name, and the fact that the author hides consistently behind the initial makes this possibility even more probable.
Having said this, Tressan is an extremely rare surname in Germany, and Tressau is even more obscure. I searched some huge databases of personal names (telephone directory and DNB Normdatei) and Tressan occurs once or twice, but Tressau has no hits at all. It should be feasible to identify that specific "L. Tressan/L. Tressau" using genealogical databases without sifting through too many hits.
I think I finally found it, it must be Nadvorney's Spherical Chess as described here
It took me some searching on this site to find back the thread on 72 Capablanca Variants here: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?itemid=72+Capa+variants
This variant was already proposed by David Paulowich before 1996 and it is mentioned in the preface on Ralph Betza's thoughts on Outrigger Chess here: https://www.chessvariants.com/d.betza/chessvar/outrig.html
Paulowich's variant has no page on this site (there is Victorian Chess https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/victorian-chess here which is similar but with the Archbishop in the Queen's position)
The Beautiful Beasts are ready for publication.
Ah yes, I see, it is a halfling Rose indeed!
Shouldn't the Rose have the move qN8 (including a zero move if the full circle is available) instead of just qN4? In the starting position after
- k4-k5 ... it should be possible to play 2. Of2-f6.
Nice to see the Spotted Gryphon in this diagram, it is another difficult piece to describe!
Thanks for featuring Quinquereme Chess with an interactive diagram! Unfortunately, there is a glitch in the implementation of the Quintessence and its compounds, it is lacking the lateral development like
f5 - d6 - c4 - a5
or
f5 - g7 - e8 - f10
I guess, the initial "hq" is too much and suppresses some moves. The Quintessence in Nachmahr without the initial two letters "hq" works fine.
Was this from game results or just the values that Zillions reports for the pieces?
This is now about 2 decades ago, but as I remember that estimate was based on played-out games (don't know how many). Already at that time I knew that Zillion's piece evaluations weren't very accurate, e.g., most combination pieces were just evaluated as the sum of their components.
An army consisting almost completely of slip-pieces could be named "Sloppy Slippers".
Interestingly, my first draft from November 2001 had the fully lame Unicorns, and I am very interested how they fare in FairyMax. With Zillions of Games as an Oracle the original draft was considered too weak, and the the Unicorns were powered up with unconditional Knight's moves.
For the theme of the army, a colourbound piece is completely unsuitable although one can argue that a slip-Bishop still switches some bindings. But when it is too weak, what would be a good augmentation for it?
I am probably a bit late in commenting, but jAA has a meaning in Classic Betza notation (an Alfil-jumper-rider, i.e. a piece needing hurdles for each Alfil step it takes), and changing that meaning to something very ad-hoc is probably a bad idea. Either adding a new lowercase letter for slip-movement or attempting for a generic solution with different types of movement in the two legs of the move as in Betza's proposal t[FAA] would be better. Or new uppercase letters for the atoms slip-Rook and slip-Bishop.
Great! Thanks.
The Castle is lacking the Alfil move in the diagram.
The new setup is mistaken, the Knights are between the Rooks and the Bishops, and the Bishops are on different colours, compare p. 77 in the book by L. Tressan here: https://books.google.de/books?id=n64UAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Just a few days ago I created some diagrams with dots meaning plain and empty squares. I usually use numbers for fully empty lines, but dots for spaces in lines with pieces or decorations.
I suspect that there are more diagrams of this kind.
Thanks Greg. Can you update the Emperor's Game as well?
I cannot reproduce that problem, pressing CTRL-U in Firefox gives me a clean and readable source page.
P.S. Can we complete Peguilhen to Ernest-Frédéric von Lavergne-Peguilhen (1769–1845), recipient of the last letter from Henriette Vogel and Heinrich von Kleist? Life dates and occupation are fitting, and he also went simple by Peguilhen.
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I find the square board tags quite handy, they allow a quick navigation to other games on the same board. Going to the game info page and selecting the right category (best working is the number of cells in the case of square boards) takes longer.
And I really love the piece tags.