Comments by nelk114

OK so looking at the page as it stands, I think I can make out most of the rules, so in that sense it at least more‐or‐less meets the minimum criteria for publishing. Nevertheless I feel it could be profitably edited to make the flow of information clearer. A couple of specifics:

• ‘In a row’ (Pieces section, Paragraph 1) doesn't imply adjacency in English; I would consider all the black pieces in each Diagram except the g7 knight to be in a row. ‘Adjacent’ would be more precise, or you could say explicitly that this applies even if there are no empty spaces between them, as long as there is one behind them
• The descriptions of the pieces make no distinctions between rules (e.g. “moves & checks as in chess, unobstructed diagonal line”) and incidental observable properties (“can't capture a piece which stands on the edge of the board”); in general it's more useful to separate these out clearly — the latter is perfect Notes section material
• It might be clearer to describe the details of the Ranging moves (and captures) outwith the individual piece sections, all in one go; it might even be sufficient to just describe how their captures differ from the orthodox ones (e.g. “Bishop, Rook, and Queen move and give check as in normal Chess, but capture differently as follows:” followed by the list of applicable rules).
• You note that capturing is optional for the knight; is it possible for it to take one potential victim but not both? The Example clarifies that it can capture even if the other square it passes through contains a Friendly piece, but that might be worth making textually explicit too
• Can a king castle if it's in check from a piece it would capture by castling? e.g. White Ke1,Ra1/Black Rd1? A literal reading says no, but it could be made more explicit either way
• The requirement for a space between pieces to be captured by castling is inconsistent with the lack of such a requirement for all other pieces; why?
• The distinction between giving check and winning by capture, whilst as you say shared with Atomic, I find very strange (in both games); saying that a threat of capture is also check would lead to entirely equivalent outcomes. But with Atomic as a precedent I guess this isn't in itself really a blocker for publication

The main problem here is that I don't think anyone among the editorship understands Russian (I can speak German and Spanish, I presume H.G. speaks Dutch, and Jean‐Louis, while not presently an editor, would be able to help with French, but as far as I'm aware that's about it), so it would be difficult to be confident in the quality of such a translation (though I suppose there are other Russian speakers on this forum, who might be better placed to help in this regard?).

That said, in principle I'm all for having more Russian‐language (or any other non‐English) pages, so if we can find a way to make this work by all means :‌)

Note that a pair of Stewards can in general force checkmate against a bare King

I hadn't expected that or I'd've had a provisional note to that effect; it's added now, as is an updated note about the value.

I don't suppose there's a way of linking to the 3‐on‐1 checkmating applet with pieces preselected? There's a similar thing on e.g. the Archbishop page but it doesn't use the normal 2‐on‐1 applet

I'm sure someone will come up with it within the hour

Hardly on time, but the Griffin+Rhino is Gilman's Gorgon, also used under that name by Daniil Frolov

The problem of names of the piece, which is already an issue in English, may become a problem with other languages

Yeah piece nomenclature would definitely be the hardest part of this; as H.G. notes, there'll be some precedent in whatever exesting literature on CVs there is in a given target language, but that will almost certainly be limited in scope for most languages compared to what we have here (even, say, Die Schwalbe's relatively extensive glossary has some, from a variantist point of view, arguably major omissions). And as you say there's a certain amount of conflicting usage between languages that makes things less than straightforward.

Of course, that cuts both ways; would‐be translators have an opportunity (if they do their research appropriately) to avoid making quite as much of a mess of naming as we have in English :‌) Even if we don't go as far as attempting the likely‐futile task of trying to replicate the likes of Man and Beast in, say, French.

And depending on the pages Lev is interested in translating it may not be much of an issue at all; plenty of games on these pages use only the Orthodox sextet

If I had to translate Bigorra with its more than 30 different pieces, I may come to some difficulties

Might be an interesting exercise in itself, to see how feasible such a task would be. And whilst i don't know the established French names (assuming there are any) for Cardinal/Marshall/Amazon, most of the remaining pieces (with the exception of the Direwolf and maybe the Soldier) ought to be easily translated word‐for‐word. For Russian we might have to pay more attention to the Elephant and Ship (we could always take precedent from English and go with ‘Филь’ for the former at least), and Italian/Spanish/German might want something more distinct from ‘dame’ than ‘duchess’, but these are exceptions really.

I now set up a 3-vs-1 page that can be preconfigured in the same way as the existing 2-vs-1 page

I've added a link to that, plus a bit more of your detailed explanation (with the terms clarified — hopefully correctly — as they're as yet far from established terminology)

The mFcW is potent (it can switch its attack from c1 to a1 by moving from c2 to b1), and can thus in principle force mate together with any minor

I'm lightly torn on whether to include this information on the page too; it's not the main subject of the page but it's interesting and it'd be a shame to have it hidden away in a comment

You're missing a link to Interdependent Chess

It does have a link earlier in the page; I had made a conscious decision not to duplicate links (the two Schwalbe glossary links being to different portions of the document), though I don't feel strongly about that if you feel it's better to link it twice

I left a comment on that page about the name of Guardian being used for the Berolina Steward in Lt. Obert's Decimal Chess from the 1870's

I'd completely forgotten about that, especially since it's not the main subject of the page; I've added a mention thereof (though CECV gives the date as 1880, which is what I've put down)

In Decimal Chess, Obert gave his Guardian a double move

The relevance of double moves for pawnlike pieces such as steward and guardian had gone completely over my head; it's late now but I'll make sure to double(!) check when I next get time to do so what the rules are in the various games (though I expect it'll be double moves only if they're pawn replacements)

The difficulties in Fr would be that "knight" is translated by "chevalier" in a general context and by "cavalier" (meaning a horse rider) in the context of chess. So a CV having Knight, Cavalier and Chevalier, will be difficult to translate in French. Or a CV having a Tower and a Rook, both being "Tour". A CV having a Lady, would be translated as "Demoiselle", as "Dame" is already the word for Queen. Etc.

In general, this is true, yes; my previous comment was referring specifically to Bigorra (and by extension the rest of the games in its family) which doesn't have such conflicts.

The difficulties with translating to French are mainly due to French being one of the main sources for Modern English

I'd say the difficulty is a little subtler: English, due to both its Lingua Franca status and its extensive acquisition of loanwords, simply has a lot of words in certain semantic domains that mean either the same or very similar things. Which is obvious when, as with French, there are actual clashes, but even in Russian I'd be a little surprised (perhaps @Lev can enlighten us?) if it had three different words for Knight/Cavalier/Chevalier.

For comparison, German might get away with that triplet using both ‘Knecht’ and ‘Ritter’, (cognate to ‘Knight’ and ‘Rider’ respectively, and with (I think) slightly different connotations), but even then only because the Chess Knight is unrelatedly named ‘Springer’ — it can thus even spare a word for ‘Horse’ (‘Pferd’ — or even ‘Ross’ if necessary, though that'd be a bit like naming two pieces ‘Horse’ and ‘Steed’ in English). It would have just as much trouble as French with ‘Rook’/‘Tower’ (both ‘Turm’), though.

At some point, creative license would no doubt become necessary.

Some English speakers would call [Cardinal and Marshall] Archbishop and Chancellor or Princess and Empress

And some would call the Amazon Ace or Terror. Yes, English CV nomenclature is a mess.

One might argue that's an accident of history: several people independently reinventing the same pieces under different names before any one convention got established. There's no reason a priori to replicate that in translation (this being the ‘opportunity’ I referred to).

Since you've done the research, would you care to do the honours of writing up a page?

If not I'll probably pick it up eventually (unless someone else beats me to it), but since I don't own a copy of your book I'd probably miss something.

his chess variant was not even that great

The distinction there is probably not so much one of quality as of priority; it's one of the earliest enlargements of Shatranj (behind Grant Acedrex) that did more than add one, maybe two, pairs of pieces to the board.

Odd. It works for me in the full comments listing but not in isolation.

Also, the AI capitulates immediately as the game begins without Kings on the board.

H.G. had mentioned Superchess

should [arbitrary XBetza move footprints as blastZone] have an absolute orientation, or be relative to the move of the burning piece? […] you could not specify an Advancer with [absolute directions]

But surely the advancer doesn't have a burning move? But rather an extension of its movement to capture on the next square? After all, passive burning is out of the question for an advancer (unless it were to remember its orientation)

Or have I misunderstood how blastZone works? (And also, now that I'm rereading the IDiag page, does the burn spell act only on pieces landing next to the spellcaster, or also on pieces it lands next to? A strict reading of the text implies the former plus a need for a matching blastZone, but this seems… an unusual rule, if consistent with modern Tenjiku)

cc (or, indeed, :) looks like it'd make sense

I assume I'd added the tag on account of the ‘Minimal Not-Particularly-New Chess’ subvariant described some way down the page, which basically only adds the Cardinal to the usual array and would thus qualify.

It's not entirely clear what to do about pages describing multiple games; do we tag it if anything on the page qualifies, or only if they all do? Or, in cases like this, only if it's the main game on a page? I'm happy to remove the tag if we prefer (either of) the latter two

Do you have a link for that? Would definitely be good info to have here

@Bob: No doubt you're at least the first person to deploy it using Gilman's name :‌) (even if that's an even more trivial place in history ;‌P)

Clearly one argument against expanding beyond ASCII would be disagreement over which letters to include! My preference would be where possible to stick to non‐precombined characters; thus we'd both be ok with ⟨Þ⟩ or ⟨Æ⟩, but I'd avoid ⟨Š⟩ and ⟨Ä⟩ whereas you'd (presumably) take exception to ⟨Ƿ⟩ or ⟨Ꞵ⟩ (assuming those even show up for you).

One valid use for beyond‐ASCII letters imo would be expanding Betza beyond the square board; we have few enough capitals left that e.g. ⟨Ⅎ⟩ for ‘ⅎiceroy’ or ⟨ẞ⟩ for ‘ßexton’ (both of course Gilmanese) might be in order. And since the ID doesn't do non‐square boards (except through hacks as for Chess66) it wouldn't even need to worry about them. Likewise the non‐square directional qualifiers (I'm maybe grasping at straws a little with ⟨ɂ⟩ and ⟨ƿ⟩ for ‘up’ and ‘doǷn’, but non‐ASCII letters cover an odd sound space…)

There is no such thing as a 'regular keyboard'

Especially when you have people like me who (heavily) customise their layouts; all the characters I've just typed (except the quotation) are accessible for me without copy–pasting

Hmmm, there doesn't seem to be any attribution on that (unless it's missing because I'm on Desktop); shame really, nice to be able to attribute things where due. I'll definitely mention it though (and might be worth the Chess+ link as well (I'd look for it myself but the site seems to lack a search facility), if only for the attribution — and the fact that ‘Test’ is not the most inspiring name for a game!)

ChessCraft

I'd been wondering where you were getting all the variants from (especially since you attribute them to others) that you've been posting IDs for :‌)

‘Marine’ here is a problemist usage; most of these names do seem to be standard for these pieces in the Problem world (though my go‐to source is in German so there may be differences). ‘Prawn’ for Marine Pawn differs from German usage of ‘Matelot’, or Sailor, but since I don't immediately find any English‐language references to Marine pieces that name the Pawn analogue I'm willing to let it stand.

I'll do a more thorough check later but I don't expect it'll get in the way of publishing this

Something like this? Noting that the bishop would threaten its own king (without checkmating the opponent) if it took the rook, neither side has any valid moves.

Though there seems little reason to judge that differently from a win for the last to move

I made a couple of minor edits for grammar (and in one case formatting); more could in principle be done but I prefer to be conservative with all but the most egregious things. Please check to see if there's any of the edits that you take issue with (I'd imagine not), and if they're OK with you I'll release it — I think the rules themselves are clearly enough stated

With apologies for taking so long :‌) (life got a bit busy for a moment there)

I see, I missed it because it's under the heading of Promotion rather than grouped with the description of the (unpromoted) Princess' move. I'd recommend grouping it with the latter; seems to me people are likelier to find it there

‘Mandatory promotion’ simply means deferring promotion isn't allowed, correct?

Have you tested with the (lack of) pawn‐drop‐checkmate rule? Seems to me there'd be a reason (i.e. pawn‐drop checkmates being distastefully frequent) for that to be in Shōgi, and whilst I may be wrong it doesn't look like this game differs so much that that reason would become invalid

Other possibilities include replacing one side or the other with a Querquisite ((al) or (ar))

By which I assume you mean Quintessence? ;‌)

I'm among those who are not so big on the leaping riders, but I'll admit these are pretty cool. And of course sliding analogues (R or B plus chiral qK) are also possible

Note that Betza's Twin Tower moves outward forward or backward; i.e. it's the same piece as Jean‐Louis' Ship, and thus shouldn't be able to reach the sW squares at all.

Incidentally, the Twin Tower paragraph has a dangling footnote reference; Greg's edits effaced the original footnote (a jokingly cynical take on World Trade Centre merchandise). Is it worth restoring that (It's probably still on the Internet Archive somewhere), or better to simply remove the footnote reference?

This reasoning seems sound to me

Other (minor) advantages include the usual visual trope (the Pokémon Girafarig comes to mind) that the forward‐facing head is more prominent (the Ram is both bigger than and in front of the Ox), and (super minor, but a nice touch) that the positions of the larger and smaller heads matches that of the original Knight–Camel image (which, incidentally, is used on several (all?) pages featuring the Pushme–Pullyu, not just here)

Would it be worth trying a slightly less flattened Ram? Probably due to the relative roundnesses, it seems to suffer that scaling more than the Ox does

The big omission I see: can an Immortal capture on the move it's brought in with?

While bringing them into the game players have to make sure that they are moved at a safe distance from both Kings, so that no King will be in check

Is this an extra rule? Ensuring your own king won't be in check makes sense, but you've nowhere else suggested that it would be a bad idea to potentially check the opposing king, unless this is supposed to tacitly forbid that

I am not sure if anybody has ever tried before to use chess pieces with hidden identities

The Disguised Pieces tag has a couple games that might be similar; These two probably come closest, though neither goes quite as far as your Immortals

I think you mean more flattened

I'd meant less horizontally flattened, i.e. wider, but yes making it less tall achieves the same and it does look better that way

might seem unrealistic in a composite

I imagine with semi‐abstract iconography like this people tend to be willing (I know I am) to suspend their disbelief a little :‌)

the Deception Chess has removed everything but the title

That's odd; it shows up fine for me

(the gist of it is that each piece has a secret identity (chosen by the owning player) and on your move you can change a still‐disguised piece into its secret counterpart. Pieces have their secret identity revealed on capture, and the secret king is the one that has to be checkmated/captured)

(Let's hope we never need a Spider-Elephant compound...)

Since Spider is another name for the Alfil-Dabbabah compound, it's not very likely to happen.

But with Spider also in (sparse) use for the Manticore, it's not totally out of the question…

4D has at least two more symmetrical tilings: Xyrixa‐prism (a line of boards each of which has the same topology as Tetrahedral Chess or OctHex), as well as one that continues the Hex–Xyrixa–??? line which I've wondered about for a while but have never looked into in enough detail. There might also be one or two more in the class of the following.

There is also one more 3D one that Charles never explored (and noöne else seems to have used either), the bitruncated cubic honeycomb. Which corresponds to the other close‐packing of spheres that the Xyrixa geometry doesn't cover.

Unfortunately Charles hasn't been seen here since 2016, so even if he were interested in 4D (which he stated several times that he wasn't) it's unlikely that he'll do much on that front. And even there, the Hybrid Diagonal stuff is already kind of pushed into more‐or‐less expansion article territory.

If you're really interested, of course, you can devise some names yourself :‌)

Can confirm it's not showing up; the ID seems to be requesting /graphics.gif (which of course does not exist) rather than /graphics.dir/alfaeriemisc/compounds/wzebrawazir.gif as expected

As notorious as I am for getting things backwards

Looks to me like you've done it again… ;‌)

With the height (if not the style) of the headgear (and in the first image the barely‐noticeable arms), my first thought was rather of the Lamassu (a creature yet to be graced with a place in a CV)

But I agree it's probably the most centaurine piece model I've seen so far

One last detail: traditionally what you've put under Movement in the rules section is what the Pieces section is intended for. Whether you want to append it to that section as is or interleave it with the images is up to you.

Once that's done, this looks otherwise ready for publication

I think the use of ‘leaping’ where the other pawns simply ‘move’ suggests that they do, in fact, leap (making your diagram accurate)

It could have been made clearer, but it's not so difficult to find: locusts spawn in the square vacated by a moving king, or result from the demotion of a capturing Leo

I'm thinking that this is because there is not a lot of experience in games with jokers.

At least in my case that's very much the reason; in principle the dicussion is very interesting (especially since a game I've been thinking about would involve a closely‐related, if potentially even more powerful (though less apparently‐random) piece)

My impression is that jokers are a bit like Querquisites and Smess/Ivory‐Tower pieces, in that they depart substantially enough from normal Chess dynamics that they'd take a good bit of learning to handle. And in their particular case, the art of dealing with them is in part (principally?) the fact that they reduce the value of strong pieces, especially if well placed: you can't freely move the queen if there's a joker ready to copy its move while still being worth (on average, presumed — though of course this ‘chilling’ effect increases its value correspondingly to the powerful pieces on the board) less.

I'd be interested to see how Jokers handle in games with (a small number of) really powerful pieces. I'd almost predict that capturing the jokers to free the power pieces (with maybe some judicious moves by the latter in between either while the J is still hidden in the setup position, or to give check) would be an important middle‐game theme.

But in any case for now you're probably one of the people here with most experience with the J :‌)

Reading over this again, I have to agree Warmachinewazir still sticks out as an incredibly clunky name; since you already have Ferfil for the piece whose image is named Elephantferz, why not the corresponding (albeit apparently thus far confined to Gilman) Wazbaba?

@Kevin:

I'd missed/forgotten that particular objection to Wazaba/Wazbaba, and I do agree that if you don't like it then you ought to be free to not use it (though my search for the ⟨Wazaba⟩ form did turn up your own 4 Kings Quasi-Shatranj, for what it's worth). Though for what it's worth, alternative piece names for Orthochess pieces rarely become less idiomatic English, and as H.G. notes it's not the proliferation of names as such that's the issue here

I think there were only four games (the four I left, for now, unpublished: Accelerated and Unaccelerated Constabulary/‐ble Chess/‐spiel) using this name, and only once each; the WMW Chess/‐spiel setting files are of course more unfortunate OK never mind, I forgot about WIP's, but even there besides the WMW games the only other usage seems to be in Bureau‐Spiel, so only 5 mentions total excluding eponymous games

I'm fairly sure the sometimes awkward names of some more obscure pieces are part of what turned people off M&B (though even then, under C I only spot Canvalander, Cardirider/‐lander/‐runner (of which the first as Cardinalrider is relatively uncontroversial), a couple of Camel‐ pieces (all relatively obscure), and Cbehemoth/Cbuffoon/Cmutilator for (cool but almost wilfully awfully‐named) Brook‐style pieces — more than average, sure, but he names more pieces at all than average and most of these are fairly obscure, used only by himself if at all). The criticism applies validly there too (with different mitigating factors)

Most 3‐word compounds in English (‘whatsoëver’, ‘notwithstanding’, ‘albeit’, ‘inasmuch’, ⁊c.) tend not to be nouns ;‌) Or much of anything except moderately obscure grammatical particles. And nor is it a productive way of producing new words; they're all lexical fossils of sorts

In any case I personally won't insist too hard on the name; it's clunky, and in apparently the majority opinion unnecessarily so, but you seem to be very keen to keep it for whatever reason and ultimately the freedom to pick names (at least up to generating confusion) does stand

@H.G.:

Wazbaba is Gilman's spelling; I'd never noticed that most others uses lack the first b (and had thus assumed Haru's was a typo). As a wazir–dabbaba portmanteau I definitely prefer it with both ⟨b⟩s myself

@Bob:

Whilst I'm not as hardline as Jean‐Louis regarding ‘Aanca’ (for better or worse, it did build up a small history of use for W‐then‐B and imo at least in the context of variants from that time retains a little validity), I fail to see the wisdom in compounding the confusion (especially with an already‐controversial name) by assigning it to yet a third (especially so closely‐related) piece. If not ‘Godzilla’ for Gryphon+Rhino, there's always Gilmanese ‘Gorgon’ (used also by Frolov)

@Jean‐Louis:

I think Betza's error in Bent Sliders was not so much one of interpretation as one of judgment ;‌) He knew perfectly well it was “Spanish for [the piece with English name] Gryphon”

with D2 rather than D7 that rises to 159

My interpretation was that the forward‐only thing was just a pragmatic way of ensuring offensive play, sort of like a primitive cousin of the jeu forcé. Much in the same way as Draughts/Checkers has FO pieces.

So if I understand correctly, the diagonals thing is just the procedure for how you've generated what during gameplay is a static morphing table? Rather than having any dynamic effect during gameplay

I don't understand the morphing to Chancellor on d4, d6, f4, and f6; surely by this game's logic that would be a Queen morph, as it's on a diagonal with Rook and Bishop? (Which would mean that the Chancellor would not appear at all)

Are you really sure about the name ‘Kinginv’? Why not ‘Commoner’, ‘Man’, ‘Prince’, ‘Guard’, or any of the other established names for a non‐royal K?

I did notice some 3 English 'words' in 1 that are nouns that Gilman coined, especially in his second section with words beginning with C (towards the end of that section).

You mean the likes of ‘Coviewingspot’/‘Cowingnut’/‘Coworkload’? Maybe I'm counting differently (I wouldn't tend to count prefixes like ‘co‐’ which are part of most names on that page specifically, otherwise ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism’ (at least 6 segments — and in fact a noun!) would carry precedent; hence I wouldn't really consider ‘counterclockwise’ an example either) but I still only consider those two‐part compounds at heart. Which leaves the likes of ‘Coupandup’ which might be the only true 3‐part compound (plus suffix for 4) on the page as far as I could tell, but still isn't really a noun as such. And really shows the desperation of finding unique names for such a wide range of pieces (and in particular the many possible 3D leaper compounds which are unlikely to see practical use)

Please let me know sooner or later if I should do name editing all the same

If you've since found a name you like acceptably well in comparison to WMW that'd probably be best; if you still strongly prefer WMW I'll leave it at that and publish at least those four (and the others, failing some other major oversight)

Apologies, I'd meant to publish the Accelerated games alongside the regular(?) ones but apparently neglected to actually hit the update button.

That said, the links in particular are a welcome addition which arguably the other pages would benefit from too if you're not too averse to adding them

Aand you've rederived these pieces as a back‐formation ;‌) These are the original (long‐ and short‐, respectively) non‐helical switchback rhinos as proposed by Gilman (and independently by KelvinFox).

Actually never mind, these are two of Gilman's four: Long‐switchback Rhino and Short‐switchback Mirror Rhino. The other two move the same but with the non‐alternating step first.

Note incidentally that Gilman's ‘rhino’ is this one (specifically the sliding version), not the (modified) GA one as popularised by Jean‐Louis (hence why both forms are referred to by that name). The fact that both begin W‐then‐F is coïncidence

Also (belated) Happy Birthday :‌)

I think the [vulture] is an invention of Lev's

I thought it was from Aurelian's Grand Apothecary Chesses?

This seems like a really cool idea from the late Problemist

As far as admin is concerned, I assume it desirable to have a link to this as Kazan Chess (the original name), and to credit Grolman as the inventor? Since it looks like you've done a bit of filling in the details, it's at your discretion whether you wish to take coïnvention credit.

Since it originates as a problem theme, two further questions arise:

• How does it actually play as a game? I imagine it's very different in flavour from Orthochess but I wonder whether it might tend to be a bit chaotic.
• Would it be worth including a problem or two on this page? I don't know if there would be copyright issues with including the original 1995 Problemist composition, but your Mate in 2 is pleasantly illustrative

I imagine there are more interesting ways to resolve the Castling issue than simply disallowing it outright (other pieces either have to fill both vacated squares where possible, or just the king's one as Castling seems to be a K move by problem convention (see the discussion of Half‐Neutral pieces in the same Problemist issue), and we could consider a K or R unmoved if it has only moved involuntarily), but this solution works too

This one looks good now

As for Morphomania:

I'll have to think about that again, because I haven't really understood it yet. A little more time would be nice.

Note incidentally that whilst the plated Pashtuns lack any kind of established images, the riders had enchanced R/B images (see top of second diagram) associated to them by Gilman. A matter of taste of course, whether you see them as plated first or riders first. And of course these images haven't been converted to SVG either

You could argue that the Lance/Incense Chariot is the ‘true’ Rook of Shōgi, seeing as the Flying Chariot is a later addition. Which makes it as consistent as the King