Ratings & Comments

Maybe we could speed the game up a bit by making some pieces slightly faster and, like the Drunken Nights of CwDA, tone down the White Blood Cell a bit.

I was looking to this Interactive Diagram (thanks HG). The Prince's move is not correct. It is not K. It should be KimfnD.

I wish I could edit this page to present it in a better manner, and consistently with my other variants. Is that possible?

I was looking to this Interactive Diagram (thanks HG). The Prince's move is not correct. It is not K. It should be KimfnD.

The description in the page says K, so that is what I use in the Diagram.

Our old pages like this one are hard html files, whereas the new submissions ("member submissions") store their content in the database. (All the pages have indexing information in the database.)

So you can edit "member submissions" using forms that pull up the database fields, let you edit them, and then push updates to the database. But older files like this one cannot be edited from a web form. Instead, you can edit the html file itself, and an editor can upload it to the site; it isn't so much about editorializing, just the technology. (You'd have to send us the new image files too; there's another benefit to the modern member submissions: we've added file upload scripts.)

In my previous post I started to think about how to migrate an old style page to the new format. If Fergus and Greg think it's not unreasonable we might try that. When I have time I'll give it a try on our dev/backup site.

OK, I see. But the Diagram is intended as a means for practicing the variant that people have just read the rules of in the article, so I think it would be bad to surprise them with other rules. If you manage to correct the article, I will adapt the Diagram accordingly. Of course it would be better if you included the Diagram in the main page of the article; then it will not be pushed into oblivion by later discussions like this one. And then you can correct the Prince move yourself.

Testing the preset of this variant using the PLAY someone at the same location resource, I got to a position that shows that there is a bug.

After the following moves

1. P g4-g6

1 ... p g9-g7

2. Z i1-g4

2 ... c g10-g9

3. Z g4-i7

3 ... c g9-g8

4. P f4-f5

4 ... a e11-i7

5. S e3-f4

5 ... a i7-d2; q-dest

6. S f4-g5

6 ... q d2-i7

7. A h2-f4

7 ... q i7-i3 // - check! -

White has only 2 moves for removing the check: 8. E j3-i3 and 8. I k3-i3

However, the first is banned by the software warning that

g4 is empty. Use your browser's BACK button to go back to the previous page, then reload if necessary. If this is your settings file, you may edit it at https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play .php? game = Mosaic + Chess & settings = mosaic & submit = Edit 

while when wanting to perform the latter, the software asks

Which piece will you promote to? 

showing a menu of 19 options, all pieces of the blue side.

EDIT: Just realized that moving 8. U j1-i3 cancels the check correctly but does not invalidate the gist of the report.

At a first couple glances, this looks nice!

It's nice to see the Ship back again after you took it out of your mainline larger games, and ofc the snake fits logically with it. The Cheetah (aka the Beaver for those who are into Gilman) is nice too (and much rarer than the squirrel) and the Sabre‐tooth I've never seen before — it's kinda terrifying!

A couple of notes: afaik the name snaketongue (whence iirc your shortened snake) goes back to Betza's Bent Riders article — which also mentions the ship (under the name twin tower — arguably in bad taste but acknowledged as such in the original version; I think Greg accidentally(?) removed that when he added his own footnotes).

And regarding your question at the beginning, one argument for even ranks is that otherwise a pawn reaching the middle rank has an advantage over its counterpart that can't be trivially made up for. Idk if i've seen it said this way round (maybe in the comments on H.G.'s Elven Chess) but certainly there was a proposal by Rich Hutnik that on boards with odd ranks the pawn should be able to capture straight forwards to balance that advantage (by discouraging a move to the middle rank). Ofc that hasn't stopped people, and it may well matter less than it was made out to. And indeed (other than a kind of symmetry) there's nothing in particular to suggest any advantage for even files.

Great looking, nice thema. What I have not understood reading the rules, is how the pieces start? What is the initial setup?

Thank you BnEm. I don't understand all what you say. English is not my mother tongue and I don't get the meaning of "Idk","afaik","ofc", "iirc" which are probably shortcuts but I don't know for what.

Also, I don't get this sentence "Otherwise a pawn reaching the middle rank has an advantage over its counterpart that can't be trivially made up for." What do you mean "trivially made up for", I'm lost.

Concerning the Ship, I used it only in my Tamerlane II, not on my other variants. Actually, I adopted it long long time ago, in the very first CV I created (and fabricated, pictures exist in https://www.chessvariants.com/d.photo/tamerlane.html), in 1978, https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/tamerlane2-old.html Of course in that time we had not Internet, I had no computer, it was prehistory, I was not speaking English at all, and I didn't know Betza (smile).

Oops, I think I lost the image for that. I'll update.

‘Idk’ and the others are indeed abbreviations: ‘Idk’ itself is ‘I don't know’; ‘Afaik’ ‘as far as I know’; ‘Ofc’ ‘Of course’; and ‘Iirc’ ‘if I recall correctly’.

As for trivially making up, a pawn on the central rank stops the opponent's pawn from making the same move (as that space is now occupied) and the opponent can't immediately do anything equivalent, and so has won a (potentially) better position with little effort — and since White can force this more easily than Black, the argument goes that normal pawns of an odd‐file board might give White more of an advantage. Here is the formal write‐up of Hutnik's idea, which he first proposed here, and the first few comments on Elven Chess(/Elven Shogi) also touch on it.

I seem to remember the old versions of some of your larger games (Gigachess ⁊c.) had the Ship, before you updated them. And ofc I wasn't accusing you of ‘stealing’ the ship ;) just noting that it also exists where the snaketongue was first named (I expect Eric probably got it from there, though it's certainly possible he came up with it independently).

Is chess [still] important? An older member of my chess club once opined in the new millennium that chess is no longer as important as before. I didn't ask what he meant. To me, chess reached its high mark in the 1970's, mainly with the Geo-political stakes involved in the Fischer-Spassky match, and later the Karpov-Korchnoi one. Chess was also important back then since it was seen as a test for AI whether a machine can beat a highly skilled human player at the game. Chess suffered to some degree because of what followed historically, in both cases.

These days, one Googles 'why is chess important' and the top answers that come up have only to do with the benefits of chess to students and/or children. Does anyone see any other meaningful reasons why chess might be viewed as important in modern times?

edit: I also posted the above on a Canadian Chess (CFC) message board. A reply by Aris Marghetis went: "If I may humbly suggest, chess serves as an inspiration: people of all kinds of differences being able to come together to compete, to create, to enjoy.

I'm not aware of any other single activity that can be played across all kinds of divisions that humanity has created, maintains, etc. Chess is universal!"

Nice! One thing I notice is that the script asks if you want to promote -- it's mandatory and not a choice.

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