Ratings & Comments

I think you've asked a similar question before, and the answer (including re this case) is further down this comment thread ;)

I also have a question of my own: just to clarify, a Dark Spirit or Buddhist Spirit capturing a Deva or Teaching King, or vice versa, causes it, like other pieces, to convert to its victim? The notes clarify that, as expected, one of them would disappear, but don't make clear which one, and one could make a case imo for contageous pieces being immune to contageon themselves.

Where can you buy a Omega Chess set?

great article , this is definitely one of the best for young chess players to read and learn strategy.

This page describes the rules of a Chess variant. It is not about Chess strategy.

If you intend on writing more similar content on this site be sure to check out our page with more inspiration for future posts

The author of this page hasn't been around for a while. The page you linked to is for a Baseball-themed Chess set. Although this page has no diagram, the game is apparently played on a 9x9 board. So, it could not be played with a regular Chess set, though perhaps the pieces from a Baseball-themed Chess set could be used with it.

You are arguing with a spam bot.

Three obvious potential improvements stand out, besides the aforementioned grammatical issues:

• The setup diagram is misleading; even though you clarify that the fore‐ and hindmost ranks are not actually part of the board, it's probably better to make that clear in the diagram too
• Similarly, using pieces to denote destination squares in the movement diagrams is extremely(!) confusing. The diagram designer does provide for using coloured circles for this purpose; consider finding out how to use that functionality
• The drop rule is not clear. You say that cannons and two soldiers start in hand and may be dropped only on resp^ly the 1^st or 3^rd rank, but even this information is easily missed and further details (is it Shōgi‐style drops? Seirawan‐style? Sth else entirely?) are completely unspecified. I'd suggest putting a note about it in the Rules section

Also a typo: your paragraph about the Soldier refers to droppable pawns.

I believe this page to now be ready for publication.

I updated the grammar and some spelling on most of the page, rewording some things to make them clearer.

Since I don't understand the 64+16 rule, I left the text for it alone.

It looks like you're trying to describe moves using conventions from Chinese Chess. The moves would be more clearly described to a western audience if you used algebraic notation.

If you mean for Guard Soldiers to look different than Soldiers, I would recommend using a different piece set for your piece images. The one you're using has only Chinese Chess pieces in it.

I think (Siwakorn may feel free, of course, to correct me) that it means that once no more unpromoted Soldiers remain, if 64 moves pass without any captures the game is declared a draw, but a capture, rather than resetting the count, adds 16 instead.

Also I understood the Grand Continent bit to mean “Continental Chess is played widely on the Grand Continent, which is the one supercontinent of a fictional world.” [changes emphasised]

Fergus Duniho

Bn Em

I'm sorry for my poor english becease I not good at english much.

The visual for guard soldier; I use same idea from makruk that represent promoted pawn by flipped pawn, but in some makruk program represent promoted pawn by use same visual as a met (ferz) intead of use differnt visual. I already change visual of guard soldier to same as guard.

For 64+16 moves rules, Bn Em urderstood correctly it's like Bn Em expain it. I don't know how to describe it because rule isn't same as any chess variation to declare a draw.

I think (Siwakorn may feel free, of course, to correct me) that it means that once no more unpromoted Soldiers remain, if 64 moves pass without any captures the game is declared a draw, but a capture, rather than resetting the count, adds 16 instead.

He says you're right, but I still don't understand it. What is 16 added to? If 16 is added to the move count, a capture would bring on the end of the game even quicker, which is counterintuitive to the intent of the usual 50 moves rule. Or is 16 added to the number of moves that must pass before a draw may be declared?

It's added to the number of remaining moves before a draw, afaict — i.e. your latter alternative. Though I can see how my wording was ambiguous; sorry for any additional confusion from my part

Fergus Duniho

Bn Em

I already add some example game for who want it from my playing agianst Popo Chess.

And I already add variations that previous, I don't want to publish at now but want to plubish it after i make video about Continental Chess, but now i decide to add it.

For 64+16 moves rules will start counting immediately when not have any soldiers left on board. When captured occur instead of recounting will added 16 moves to remaining moves before a draw.

I think what may have happened here is the same thing that seems to have happened in a number of places around the site: at some point, a bunch of files written in UTF-8 were interpreted bytewise as what I assume is Latin-1. That also explains a number of other strange things that turn up (Ben notes that several pages have e.g. ⟨²⟩ where ⟨²⟩ is expected, and some old comments (e.g.) refer to Jörg as ⟨Jörg⟩).

I note that that transformation (and, indeed the reverse) would leave ASCII characters intact, as the backup version has (hence intact links ⁊c.) but this attempt to fix it has not (hence the broken URLs spilt around and partial names (⟨盓ric van Reem⟩) ⁊c.)

EDIT: Playing about with it, it looks like it is indeed one of the 8‐bit encodings, though the ⟨€⟩ sign suggests it's not Latin-1 but one of the others. The character between “Shuffle Chess” and “Prechess” would seem to suggest it's one where ⟨€⟩ is 0x80, as that gives a ⟨、⟩, which would make sense there (it's a punctuation used to separate items in a list) — of those, Codepage 1252 (Microsoft Windows Western European) was once quite popular iirc, so it seems a likely candidate.

EDIT 2: The backup page contains the characters Z–caron ⟨Ž⟩, S–caron ⟨Š⟩, and the O–E ligature ⟨Œ⟩; of the charsets on the linked page, codepage 1252 is the only one to contain all three of those characters, so my money is on that being the right one. As such, presumably the procedure would be to save it encoded in codepage 1252 and then open it as a UTF-8 file.

EDIT 3: A quick try at doing this with Libreoffice tells me I'm right — my Chinese isn't very good but it's enough to see that it looks plausible — the notes section for example begins with a section on how to play it on one's computer (matching the Zillions file link). Unfortunately Libreoffice still leaves a couple of things garbled: it refuses to accept bytes like 0x81 (which is unassigned in codepage 1252), rather than pass them through, which in turn leaves any character encoded using it (including the aforementioned list comma ⟨、⟩) unrecovered. A correct recovery would thus need to use software which is a bit more liberal in what it accepts/emits.

Older pages were generally written in Latin-1, and when I tried to enforce a site-wide use of UTF-8, some things didn't convert correctly. I have some backups of the database from when the columns in MemberSubmissions were still using the latin1_swedish_ci collation instead of the utf8_general_ci collation. I'll try to put together a script that will read from a backup database and not enforce UTF-8 to see if it will display properly. But that's for tomorrow, as it is time to shut down my computer for the night.

Note there are two different kinds of Chinese: traditional (Taiwan, Hong Kong) and simplified (China). And that the Japanese use basically the same kanji script. All use different encodings, though (Big 5, GB 2312 or Shift-JIS). In Windows Big 5 = page 950, and BG2312 = page 936. Japanese = page 932.

tried to enforce a site-wide use of UTF-8

That'd explain it: probably the conversion caught some pages that were already in UTF-8 and reëncoded them too.

different kinds of Chinese

My quick attempt last night at deëncoding using Libreoffice gave some pretty plausible‐looking UTF-8‐encoded Traditional Chinese (modulo anything encoded with byte 0x81, or presumably any other bytes unassigned in CP1252).

I made the script to display from a backup database, but it didn't help. To prevent it from trying to use UTF-8, I even ran it on a different domain to avoid the .htaccess file on this site. But that didn't help. It appears that the corruption is in the earliest backup of the database, which is from 2017.

I converted the introduction from every encoding available for mb_convert_encoding() to UTF-8. Some included Chinese characters, but many of these mixed in Korean or Japanese characters. The conversion most densely packed with Chinese characters was BIG-5, which I know is a Chinese encoding. But I can't tell if it says anything intelligible. Here is what I got:

Bobby Fischer簿翹?疇?兜?瓣繡??癟?〣?疇??嘔怵﹦€疑阬授￣汕?€嘔乒€??癡罈?簿翹?疆??疇?¯疑刈詹?珍岑阬員a href="http://www.chessvariants.org/d.chess/chess.html">疇??嘔怵﹦€疑阬授￣汕?€較/a> 癟禳??癡簧?矇竄??簿翹?疇?汕亂刈蜃倥汕?€嘔氐倦?癟禳??疇??疇禮?嘔抽€汕?癟翻簧疆?簪矇禳穡疆穢顫矇?繡疆???￣巫﹦€?瓊?砂€?Fischer疇職鱉癡?玳?疇??疇?汕永刈算€?疇礎??Capablanca癟簫?冕純敷?疆??疇?¯疑汀??嘔怵﹦€疑阬授￣汕?€嘔阬敉?矇竄??癟禳??疇?兜?瓣繡??癟?〣?疇???癡罈?瓣繒?嘔瓦???簿翹?癟??繞癡?玳?疇?汕亂刈領€?癟禳??癡簧?矇竄??矇?翻疆簡??疆??冕阬Ⅹ姻竹??疇?顫疆鬚穡癡癒?矇?鬚瓊?砂€? 癡?簡癡??癟?職瓣罈罈疆???疇?繞癡簣癒疆瞿?嘔佯??￣色€甄棺氐?瞻癡?玲?癟禳??Shuffle Chess瓊?玲?Prechess(疆???疇?汕亂刈領€?疆??冕抽€??癟禳??癡簧?矇竄??)疆??冕刈算€疑怏ˍ壅刈撢撳純敷?瓣翻??疆?簪疆??冕兩€¯秉氐溘掙岑?穡癟?兜嘔巫﹦€?矇瞽穡疆?翹瓊?砂€?矇?砂?〡乒?砂€嘔怏??疆?簡疇罈瞿疆糧?疑巫﹦€?瓣罈?嘔岑朝嘔乒€??疆簫繚疇?簡 癟??簣Eric van Reem疆?售?珍氐純姻??砂€?

I then converted the introduction from every encoding to Windows-1252, and I got this as a conversion from UTF-8:

Bobby Fischer，前世界國際象棋冠軍，提出一種國際象棋 的變體，其中棋子的初始配置是隨機選擇的。Fischer從而加入了如Capablanca等，提出國際象棋變體的前世界冠軍之列，然而其他的變體都沒有被成功推行過。 菲舍爾任意制象棋與更古老的Shuffle Chess、Prechess(或其他有關的變體)有些類似，但是有自己獨特的風格。這個遊戲廣泛的介紹和歷史 由Eric van Reem所寫。

This looks like a clean conversion to Chinese, and I even see 象棋 repeated a few times. Does this look accurate to you, Bn?

It looks like the cause of the corruption was converting to UTF-8. When UTF-8 was converted back to Windows-1252, it turned Chinese again. Although I can read very little Chinese, this looks correct. 象棋 gets used in the Chinese word for western Chess, and in the table describing castling, 王 gets used for the King, and 車 gets used for the Rook. So, I converted the text from a backup into Windows-1252, then cut and pasted it here, so that it is stored correctly as UTF-8. I also made local links relative, fixed some links that were incorrect, put everything in the introduction section to avoid English headings, and added a last note at the end in Chinese, thanks to an online translation tool, about this being a translation of our English Fischer Random Chess page. Finally, I deleted my previous revisions.

Why do we have pages in Chinese anyway? Is it the idea to translate the entire website in Chinese? And why Chinese, and not, say, Spanish?

It seems bad to intermingle pages of different languages. Is there a separate index for those (because I don't see this page in the normal alphabetical index)?

Since my conversion to Unicode didn't match the previous version at all, I restored the original version from a copy on archive.org. While I don't know much Chinese, I do now recognize some characters in appropriate places. However, since this translation was done by Babelfish in 1996, it may not be such a good translation.

The note does also say that one “Cherry X.Z.”, who even had an email address linked in Wayback's copy, ‘modified’ it, which may mean it has had some human input to make it sensible Chinese.

I'll keep it on that basis. Hopefully, we'll eventually get some input from someone who can read Chinese.

I think the archbishop(s) is better on the side. That eases it's development.

Hmm, this is not obvious at all. Archbishops are very mobile and develop easily anywhere and in this respect the center of the back rank is not less favourable than the sides. I even think they can develop easier from g1 because the center Pawns are often moved first, freeing their squares, than from b1, k1 where they are trapped.

I think Aurelian may have meant he would prefer if the Archbishops were each one square in front of all the Chancellors. However, if they developed two squares forward like a Kt, they might be vulnerable to an undeveloped enemy Vao.

Having the Archbishops in the centre on the 1st rank would seem to be a possible improvement on the setup too, but I think Fergus may have definitely wanted the Cannons of an army to have empty squares to move to (on the 1st rank) at once, if a player desired, sort of like in (10x10) Shako.

Jean-Louis understood what I wanted to say, well. Thanks for the interest Kevin!

Thanks Kevin and Aurelian. I understand. Placing the Vaos needs care indeed, I met this also in my variants. I concluded that it is best to put them in the center of the 1st rank as much as possible, at least not on the sides, to avoid that they threat the opponent's lines too early, as soon as the center Pawns are developed.

In the case of a single BN and single RN, then maybe the full 1st rank would have to be considered in order to give the Cannons a max of lateral mobility and a avoid a premature threat from the Vaos. Interesting.

There is also the issue as having all pawns protected in the initial position. Don't forget about it. Although with so many pieces this is relatively easy to do!

An experiment might be to switch all the Kts with the Champions AND switch all the Wizards with the Archbishops, in the setup - play testing could proceed from there, if anyone thinks this may be a good idea to try.

The reasoning is that not only may the Archbishops get into play easier sooner, but the development of the Kts and Wizards will not take away nice squares from each other (nor the Champions from the Wizards). A drawback is that the Kts are farther from the centre, but in Fergus' setup that tries to please Kt fans it's the Champions that have to suffer that instead (and squares they want to develop to are ones both the Wizards AND Kts may want to, too). However, another drawback would be Wizrds have less nice squares to develop to. [edit: yet another drawback would be that a Wizard could no longer develop to attack an enemy centre pawn that was moved by a triple step]

My initial question was about having 2 BN and 2 RN. I was thinking in a setup with only 1 of each.

An experiment might be to switch all the Kts with the Champions AND switch all the Wizards with the Archbishops, in the setup - play testing could proceed from there, if anyone thinks this may be a good idea to try.

One of the deliberate features of the setup is that every piece except the Vaos has an empty space it can move to behind the Pawn line. If you made these changes to the setup, the Knights, Champions, and Archbishops would no longer have any empty spaces they could move to behind the Pawn line.

I have noticed that several games of Gross Chess end up with some Marshalls and/or Archbishops unmoved. Maybe the presence of two Marshalls and two Archbishops is somewhat excessive.

Even if a piece doesn't move, it influences the moves of other pieces by protecting or threatening other spaces on the board. So, not moving these pieces isn't evidence that they are playing no role in the game. This may rather be a sign that because of differences in playing ability, one player is having an easy time defeating another player. In the endgames I can recall from Gross Chess, both players got down to very little material and had to employ whatever pieces they had left.

I wonder if a variant with a single Marshall on g1 and Archbishop on f1 with empty a1, b1, k1, l1 would be worth to be investigated.

One problem with this is that it destroys the symmetry of the setup. Another problem is that it leaves the King, Queen, Bishops and Cannons without any empty spaces to move to behind the Pawn line, and a game with this setup may as well be played on a 10x10 board, since it doesn't make effective use of the greater space provided on a 12x12 board.

What might a concrete advantage of every piece (except Vaos) being able to move behind the pawn line in the setup be? [edit: closest thing to that I can think of, so far, is that a player sometimes just might be able to evade an attack/skewer by an enemy Vao or Cannon, in a way he couldn't otherwise]

What might a concrete advantage of every piece (except Vaos) being able to move behind the pawn line in the setup be? [edit: closest thing to that I can think of, so far, is that a player sometimes just might be able to evade an attack/skewer by an enemy Vao or Cannon, in a way he couldn't otherwise]

Along the lines you imagined, it makes valuable pieces less prone to capture by pieces that can hop or leap over the Pawn lines. Since the Vao is the least valuable piece, it is the piece least in need of having an escape route. Notably, Chinese Chess, which introduced the Cannon, leaves more space around the pieces than Chess does.

I understand your points. If there was 1 BN on b1/b12 and 1 RN on k1/k12 only, all your specs would be respected: all pieces can move behind the lines, all pawns are protected, the Cannons keep their mobility. Just there is no symmetry for BN and RN, but there is no symmetry for Queen either and this is not illogical. I have understood that the reason why you had 2 BNs,2 RNs is because you owned 2 physical Gothic chess sets. An option to play with a single BN/RN set would be worth to consider maybe. Just wondering.