Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

You must think well the initial setup if you use nightriders. The piece
may
add intensity to the game, but you must evaluate if idiosincracy of the
game is lost with this piece, Jumping Chess is very near FIDE CHESS, with
it´s own particularities, but the idea seems to be not too far from FIDE
CHESS. The game is beautiful AS IS, but all idea that can add interest to
the game should be considered and WELL evaluated (you can play-test the
changes and alternative setups using Zillions. As you must have noted,
Zillions plays Jumping Chess with a good level of play.

A somewhat different, but related idea might be 'Amphibian Chess' (not
previously published; name chosen in comparison to 'Mermaid Chess' and a
tendency, in the problem lit, to use sea creature names for
vault-to-capture pieces).  Play is on an 8x8 board, and units must jump
over to capture if there is a next square beyond the opposing unit, but
capture by displacement if there is not.

Since you can't jump over two adjacent pieces, all you need to do is make a mass of pieces in the middle, and they can't really be captured. In order to attack, you need to split up your mass of pieces, and I think that's a big mistake. Unless someone gets too aggressive, I think it's a sure stalemate.

Err, no. That's what the ringboard is for. If you form all of your pieces into a block, then the corners are vulnerable to capture, and since you can't enter the ringboard except by capture, you can't extend the block there.

Now, if you wanted to argue that Jumping Chess is more a defensive game than FIDE Chess, I'd say you're likely right, as leap capture is generally weaker than replacement capture, but simply blocking up isn't enough to prevent capture.

Jumping Chess originates the edge squares that Rococo uses two years later. Bishop captures like International Draughts diagonally and Rook like Turkish/Israeli draughts orthogonally. Except no plural captures, and in JC the line pieces slide any distance beforehand. But no displacement capture at all here. Jumping concepts are bandied about in 'ECV' a few times, but credit this improvement for the rim accessible only capturing.

JC may create too many defensive positions for most aesthetics.

JC year-2000 date of invention harkens to V. R. Parton's booklet 'My Games for 2000 a.d. and After' published 1972. There the CV "2000 AD" sources pieces for 30 years later great Rococo. Firsthand, Rococo is basically a derivative Ultima (1962).

( Contrariwise, Robert Abbott himself weighed in early Rococo comment that no need for border squares, just get rid of them. ) See next how Rococo draws on both Abbott and Parton. 20th century the chief variantists were Boyer, Parton, Betza and Dawson, but Dawson didn't bother with designing actual CVs.

The Rococo pieces straight out of Abbott's Ultima are Withdrawer, Immobilizer, Long Leaper, Chameleon. And the Rococo pieces straight out of 2000 A. D. are Ximaera and Swapper. Ximaera gets re-named Advancer. Finally, Rococo takes its own inventor's border squares from JC and adds that great novelty Cannon Pawn.

Perimeter-squared JC has little play, but Rococo, when adding its subvariants Push-Pull and Mirror, has the same number 10 rank approximately of near-form Ultima at Game Courier. And several ahead of them are a standard Chess form around hundred(s) years. Or combine play numbers of Ultima and Rococo and they are number 3. So arguably derived-form Rococo is a topmost world-class CV. Thanks to contribution of porous out-migration squares from selfsame JC.

The page for this contest-winning game hadn't been updated in twenty years, so I thought it was about time. I've upgraded the graphics to be anti-aliased. All images are now dynamically generated by the diagram designer. A navigation menu has been added. ASCII diagrams have been removed. Made a few minor edits, such as removing the request to vote in the contest and adding a note that this game was the winning submission.

A rule-enforcing preset would be nice, but that would probably be pretty difficult.

A rule-enforcing preset would be nice, but that would probably be pretty difficult.

As far as I got it, the only unusual aspects of this variant is the piece confinement and the mandatory capture. So it should not be that difficult. The only special-purpose code that is needed would be for rejecting moves that end on an edge square and do not specify a locust victim (which could be added as the end of the Post-Move sections), and for apparently pseudo-legal moves with non-edge pieces or non-captures with edge pieces, a test whether any of the edge pieces has a capture.

As far as I got it, the only unusual aspects of this variant is the piece confinement and the mandatory capture. So it should not be that difficult. The only special-purpose code that is needed would be for rejecting moves that end on an edge square and do not specify a locust victim (which could be added as the end of the Post-Move sections), and for apparently pseudo-legal moves with non-edge pieces or non-captures with edge pieces, a test whether any of the edge pieces has a capture.

Ok, perhaps I should have said it would be very difficult for me...

I have added full support to ChessV though.  This required a couple of special rules, but I added support for basic capture-by-overtake to the internal move generator.  My quandry now is what the pieces should be worth...  The Rook, Bishop, and Queen are modified in the same way so I assume their relative value should be similar to Chess... The board is enlarged, but use of the outer ring is limited and landing on it hurts your options on the following move significantly, so I think the values should probably not change much from 8x8 values.  The Knight is interesting - he has a choice of captures, so maybe his value is augmented.  The Pawn, when capturing, moves forward two spaces instead of one, getting it to the other side faster, so maybe it should be worth more as well.  But these are just guesses.

EDIT: Upon further consideration ... the Knight has a choice of captures, but no choice where he lands.  The Bishop, Rook, and Queen, though, unlike in Chess, can capture and still choose which square to land on (if there is space.)  So maybe the Knight is not more powerful.

Well, the idea was of course to let the GAME-code wizard do most of the work, starting from an Interactive Diagram made through the Play-Test Applet. It took a few minutes to create this with the Applet:

which does take care of the piece moves. (But not of the zonal confinement / mandatory capture.) Which has one defect, though: the e.p. capture does not work when specified on a non-final leg. At least in the move generator used for highlighting, the AI could be more accurate. I recall encountering this issue many times during programming the stuff, and each time I thought "a locust e.p. capture? Nah, that will never be needed." Obviously I was wrong. So I might have to shape up the move generator here and there, also the one I wrote in GAME code. The move tables the Betza compiler generates for this are OK, but the code that interprets them unjustly assumes an e.p. leg always is the last leg of the move.

Enforcing the rule that non-captures cannot go to an edge in the GAME code is pretty trivial; the mandatory capture is more tricky, though. In particular in combination with legal-move highlighting. I guess it would be useful to extend the move generator in the GAME-code include file with a task that would test whether there exists a legal or a pseudo-legal capture, very similar to how it checks whether there exists a legal move. Perhaps the existing code can be used for that, by introduction of a global flag that tells it to ignore non-captures. The Post-Move code for the latest move of the game could then start calling the move generator for this task for all pieces on the edge, if the move in question was a non-capture or did not start from the edge. Existence of a capture from the edge would then make the move illegal. In other cases the mandatory-capture requirement is fulfilled, and the standard procedure (which doesn't take it into account) can be called.

BTW, the Diagram's AI does think the Knight is worth more than a Bishop. For each capture target the Knight also has two possible final squares.

This is a quick approximation:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DJumping+Chess%26settings%3Djumping&submit=Edit

It enforces the rules (except that e.p. capture does not work, but this would have to be solved in the included library file). It doesn't properly highlight legal moves, though.

It is not clear to me whether this variants employs the check rule; the explanation of mandatory capture suggests it has not, as it talks about capturing the King. An alternative would be to consider the position a checkmate, as you only can do the capture with the edge piece, and it does not resolve the check.

The betza.txt library should have some feature similar to the BadZone hook for the Interactive Diagram, where the user can define a function to enforce confinement of pieces to zones. When such a function is defined each generated move should call it to check whether the move obeys the confinement rules.

Very nice!

The goal is definitely to capture the king because subvariant 6 is to play for checkmate rather than king capture, but that seems needlessly complex.