Ratings & Comments
Rocket Chess. Space-themed fairy chess variant on neoteric board: piece’s movement depends on type of cell where it stands. (Cells: 248) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Make Your Own 91-Space Hexagonal Board. Files and directions for making a hexagonal chess board.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]There are now svg files that can be printed on play mats, e.g. :
https://glyphobet.net/three-player-chess/svg/hexagonal_tiles.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hexagonal_chess_board.svg
Checkmating Applet. Practice your checkmating skill with fairy pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Your bFfhNfA can be called a Double Sword Aborigine (or something other with understanding that it’s forward Kangaroo + backward Ferz), and your fWbrFfD7lfNfrblA as Right Gun-Layer (looks very similar to optical gun), and its mirror will be Left GL.
You are right. This piece: bFfhNfA mates in 130.
Can anybody top this?
Buzzy Bees. Members-Only Bees at war on a hexagonal grid. (Cells: 127) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Checkmating Applet. Practice your checkmating skill with fairy pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]How this piece move?
Honorable Horse. Moves forward as a Knight.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Sat, May 4 02:18 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from Wed May 5 2010 01:25 PM:This doesn't explain the fact that in Heian Shogi and Sho Shogi, the Knight has the same movement as in today's Shogi. My pet theory on this and the Lance's forward-only slide is that the Bushido Code has something to do with it. The Bushido code, which says surrender is the worst dishonor, and by proxy shames cowardice, may have been inprinted on the game by making certain pieces forward-only.
Checkmating Applet. Practice your checkmating skill with fairy pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Ferz/Hospitaler Hunter: 130
Play Chess Variants with Jocly. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]A. M. DeWitt wrote on Sat, May 4 12:53 AM UTC:I made one last change to Chu Seireigi and Dai Seireigi, renaming the Lion to Lion Hawk to avoid confusion with the Chu Shogi Lion, while also keeping the Bishop + Squirrel move from before, whose Jocly code is shown below.
graph: this.cbDropGraph(geometry, [[-2,0],[-2,-1],[-2,-2],[-1,-2],[0,-2],[1,-2],[2,-2],[2,-1],[2,0],[2,1],[2,2],[1,2],[0,2],[-1,2],[-2,2],[-2,1]],[[1,1],[1,-1],[-1,1],[-1,-1]]),
(Keeping the Lion Hawk's value at 11 is reasonable, as it is basically equal in strength to a Queen, and may sometimes even have a light advantage)
In case you are wondering what a "Lion Hawk" is, I imagine it as a Japanese version of a griffin.
For the new diffusemap, simply use the Tenjiku Shogi Lion Hawk diffusemap.
For the 2D sprite, the best choice in my opinion for this piece may be the sprite two spaces to the left of the "gem" image in this spritesheet, as it resembles a griffin head with cat-like ears, at least to me. (If for some crazy reason you plan on implementing Dai Seireigi in Jocly, I would save the "falcon" image used for the griffin in other Jocly presets for the Flying Falcon or Cloud Eagle).
If you can implement these changes on the biscandine site that would be great.
P.S. Thanks for playing that test game with me. It helped me finalize the Lion Hawk's move.
Circular Chess 2.0 by Green Lemon Games
Checkmating Applet. Practice your checkmating skill with fairy pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]For this Fairy piece there is a forced mate (K+FP vs k) in 125 moves: rWbrFfDlfflNlA
Can anyone create a piece that can force a checkmate in more moves?
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The print color scheme now has its own small logo too. Since the big logo included 19th century black and white artwork of Chess pieces, I chose a more retro style that displays fairy pieces by changing the orientation of Chess piece images. According to a section of Anthony Dickins' A Guide to Fairy Chess, the inverted queen is the grasshopper, and the reclining bishop is the unicorn.
I have changed forpersonid to author in the link, and it now works.
Play Chess Variants with Jocly. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I think I've mentioned in our game chat why I prefer KNAD (or, to me, KNS) for the Lion: it does at least have some history. I don't know of anywhere else where a Lion is BNS. (Even so, if it had an adjective on the name, reflected by a compound in the Greenwade graphic, I could deal with it.)
Morphomania. Members-Only Morphing wherever you look. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Play Chess Variants with Jocly. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]A. M. DeWitt wrote on Fri, May 3 07:36 PM UTC in reply to François Houdebert from Thu May 2 04:02 PM:I'm actually starting to lean back towards the Bishop + Squirrel move for Chu Seireigi and Dai Seireigi, since in my test game of Chusei with you, if the Lion had the KNAD move you would be able to force mate in 3 with just the Lion, and I don't want one piece to steal all the show from the others.
Edit: Looking at the current position you can still force mate in 3, but you need to get more pieces involved.
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]if == 0 $mline[$mln]->movenum:
That is mixing GAME Code with PHP. GAME Code does not support classes with properties or write out array elements with brackets, and it doesn't provide read access to $mline. But you can use the value of turn with your knowledge of which side you're concerned with to determine where you are in a game.
Morphomania. Members-Only Morphing wherever you look. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, May 3 05:45 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 05:35 PM:OK, so the betza.txt code, which thus aims to test for whether the move is the one that was just entered, would work fine even in the presence of comments?
And the code to test for whether we are in prelude should look like
if == 0 $mline[$mln]->movenum:
?
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I am not familiar with this technique, but a problem could be that it is not just about positioning the images, but also about translating mouse clicks to cell coordinates. (Which must also work for empty cells, for entering non-captures.) In the table version I have attached event handlers to the cells for this.
With grid, you would use a <div> tag instead of a <td> tag for each space, and you could attach event handlers to it just as easily. What I have done in Game Courier, though, is place a transparent image over each empty space, as I have attached event handlers to the piece images.
Morphomania. Members-Only Morphing wherever you look. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]set all == mln $maxmln; // indicates last moveNote there is no $ there, so we might be talking about different things, and this one might be a legacy variable.
This operator just outputs the value of $mln.
I cannot image how this would work if mln was not the current move number.
It works because you are comparing mln with its maximum value. When there are comments, $maxmln will be greater than any move number, but it will be no higher than mln will eventually reach.
Wa Shogi. Game with many different rather weak pieces, with or without drops. (11x11, Cells: 121) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, May 3 05:28 PM UTC in reply to Mats Heden from 05:22 PM:I am not aware of any such sources.
Morphomania. Members-Only Morphing wherever you look. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, May 3 05:25 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 05:20 PM:Using grid would probably help you avoid this problem too. With grid, you should be able to make one column or row diagonal, though I have not yet tried using grid with hexagonal boards. My CSS code for hexagonal boards uses absolute positioning, as grid was not yet part of CSS when I wrote the code. Anyway, absolute positioning is another alternative to using tables.
I am not familiar with this technique, but a problem could be that it is not just about positioning the images, but also about translating mouse clicks to cell coordinates. (Which must also work for empty cells, for entering non-captures.) In the table version I have attached event handlers to the cells for this.
Wa Shogi. Game with many different rather weak pieces, with or without drops. (11x11, Cells: 121) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]From what I gather, several sources exist, with different movesets. As I don't read japanese, is there anyone who knows what the other movesets are, and how credible they are as sources for Wa?
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, May 3 05:20 PM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 04:59 PM:It does not. I have made that mistake too and had to correct it. To use
$mlnto get the move number, you need to get$mline[$mln]->movenum.
This is somewhat important, because the first things that the HandleMove routine does in the betza.txt include after the move is parsed is:
set all == mln $maxmln; // indicates last move
Note there is no $ there, so we might be talking about different things, and this one might be a legacy variable. The purpose here is to determine whether the subsequent move generation needs to generate all pseudo-legal moves, and compare the input move against those for testing its legality. Or whether it can simply assume the move is legal, because it is not the final move of the stored game, and thus must already have passed the legality test on the turn where it was entered. If the latter is the case only the moves with implied side effects are generated, (e.g. e.p. capture or castling), for the purpose of reconstructing the side effect, and apply it to the board together with the entered move.
I cannot image how this would work if mln was not the current move number.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The I.D. represents the board through a HTML table,
Game Courier used to use HTML tables for hexagonal boards, but I gave up on this in favor of using either CSS with a board image or drawing the board image. This reminds me that I was working on getting CSS to work with a generated board image so that you could view each position of the game without reloading the page, but I haven't completed that. I think I had two different approaches and wasn't sure which one to go with. I either wanted to change how I generated the board so that the image would be perfectly symmetrical, or I wanted to modify the code to work with the asymmetrical boards I was already generating. I lost sight of what I was doing when I got caught up with other projects.
in theory it should be possible to create a table with a masonry-like tiling, shifting each subsequent rank by half a cell.
I imagine this would be easier to do with CSS grid, because, as far as I know, table columns remain vertical.
I have tried this, though, and it works to some extent. But for reasons that I do not grasp yet it also changes the height of the ranks in a way that I could not control.
Using grid would probably help you avoid this problem too. With grid, you should be able to make one column or row diagonal, though I have not yet tried using grid with hexagonal boards. My CSS code for hexagonal boards uses absolute positioning, as grid was not yet part of CSS when I wrote the code. Anyway, absolute positioning is another alternative to using tables.
Electro Chess. Members-Only Every piece has a charge, every square is an electric field. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Crossroads. Crossing the diagonals generate figures. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I think the variable 'mln' gives you the current move number in the Post-Move sections.
It does not. I have made that mistake too and had to correct it. To use $mln to get the move number, you need to get $mline[$mln]->movenum. $mline is an array with a separate entry for each line of the movelist, but besides containing actual moves, it contains comments. $mln is the index that a line has in this array, but when some lines are comments, it will go out of sync with the move number.
GAME Code has turn, which will return $mline[$mln]->turn, but it doesn't currently have anything returning $mline[$mln]->movenum.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Is it possible for css to work with the horizontal or vertical hexagons shapes?
The Official Glinski Coordinates preset has CSS rendering which isn't working right for hexagonal games
The board image it was using had two separate elseif clauses dealing with it in a long series of elseif clauses in image_dimensions.php, and changes I was making to the second one had no effect. But when I noticed that it had two and combined them into one, I was able to set a value for $offy that worked for the board.
Leo. Moves on queen lines, but must jump once when taking.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]In other news, I'm told that the problem I was having with Thingiverse's editor has been patched up as of last Tuesday. I haven't tested it out yet; I probably will do so over the weekend.
290. Threeleaper. This piece is one that I had assumed was purely a problemist's piece (or a piece used only as part of a compound, such as the Frog) until I learned that it apparently is used in a version of Tamerlane. Said version isn't on this site, so I don't know how well it works in practice, but given that it can only reach about 11% of the squares on a board (at most) it's probably not impressive.
Its move is simple: it leaps three squares orthogonally. (H)
Like I say, it can have some value; just not a lot. (Still, I was surprised when I found that I hadn't already posted it.)
Such a straightforward piece deserves a straightforward model. (And of course you can easily imagine what the Fourleaper and Fiveleaper would look like!)
Morphomania. Members-Only Morphing wherever you look. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Electro Chess. Members-Only Every piece has a charge, every square is an electric field. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Buzzy Bees. Members-Only Bees at war on a hexagonal grid. (Cells: 127) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Topaz dezert by Yuthorpody, AKA neyuzzy
Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Thanks, I look into it soon!
💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, May 3 08:55 AM UTC in reply to Aurelian Florea from Thu May 2 12:37 PM:But some hints to where I put my code and what that code should be are very welcomed.
I think the variable 'mln' gives you the current move number in the Post-Move sections. What you want is special treatment for the first few ('prelude') moves, and then the normal procedure possibly followed by gating when this would be required. So something like:
if == mln 0:
... // do what has to be done for the first prelude turn
elsif == mln 2:
... // do what has to be done for the third prelude turn
else:
gosub HandleMove true;
set waiting where #ori 0 -1; // square behind moved piece
if not flag #ori and == 1 rank #ori != @ space #waiting: // virgin first-rank piece with something behind it
add space #waiting #ori; // gate the piece
empty #waiting;
endif;
endif;
You stil would have to suppress normal moves for the pieces waiting to be gated. I suppose the easiest way to do this define an alternative version of those that looks the same but does not have any moves, and put those on 0th rank. When its turn comes to be gated you then put the version with moves on the board.
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, May 3 08:19 AM UTC in reply to Fergus Duniho from 02:30 AM:Is it possible to make an Interactive Diagram use a hexagonal board?
The current standard scripts do not support that. The I.D. represents the board through a HTML table, and in theory it should be possible to create a table with a masonry-like tiling, shifting each subsequent rank by half a cell. This could be done by giving the first cell on each rank colspan 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., and all other cells colspan="2".
I have tried this, though, and it works to some extent. But for reasons that I do not grasp yet it also changes the height of the ranks in a way that I could not control.
Once the pieces are displayed on the hexagonal grid defined by the table, suppressing cell borders and coloring would allow display of a custom hexagonal board image as background.
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]When I go to any person information page and try to view game reviews, it says "$forpersonid is an unexpected variable and was not given a value".
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The Official Glinski Coordinates preset has CSS rendering which isn't working right for hexagonal games
Glinski's Hexagonal Chess. Chess on a board made out of hexagons. (Cells: 91) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Is it possible to make an Interactive Diagram use a hexagonal board?
Constabulary Chess. Chess on an 8x10 board with compound piece types added. (8x10, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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)
That works for me. I'll go edit that note presently.
And once again... I'm dropping Aanka.
@ Bn Em
I'd forgotten I'd used Wazaba in 4 Kings Quasi-Shatranj (already published long ago), but I guess my feeling on that word changed later, when what I thought was something I preferred more came to my attention (i.e. Warmachinewazir).
It's a similar story with my long published Sac Chess CV, where I used 'Judge' instead of Centaur (subsequently I've sometimes, but fully aware, used the latter, i.e. when I am not inventing a CV that I see as a spinoff of Sac Chess). Unlike Jean-Louis I don't feel I need to always use the same name for pieces when they are in different CV inventions of mine.
I don't go as far as Seirawan and Harper, when they even named a Chancellor piece an Elephant (for their S-Chess invention), which I think may fly in the face of common CV convention for that animal.
Anyway, aside from now disliking Wazaba a bit, and liking Warmachinewazir a lot ('Battletank' is a single word noun that can be found online nowadays, if a precedent is wanted outside of [CVP published] Gilman), my biggest issue is that I would have to redo/undo a number of waiting submissions[5+2=7]/(settings files[2]), especially over a matter that seems arbitrary/debatable (and just a single name). Right now I don't always have a lot of stamina for such depressing re-tracing of my steps, though I do admire those with the energy/youth to keep doing it over and over again without even a whimper. :)
Bn Em wrote on Thu, May 2 10:56 PM UTC:@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”
Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]That looks like my Viking up there. :)
I may make a logo for it with some of Tenniel's black and white illustrations from Through the Looking-Glass, though I'm open to other ideas.
I have now done that except that I cropped and divided one illustration instead of using two separate illustrations. Also, most of the small piece images I used are based on characters Alice encounters in Lewis Carroll's books.
Monster Mash. 
Armies consist of classic monsters and scary creatures. (13x13, Cells: 169) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]It doesn't. I wouldn't understand how it moves without the interactive diagram. I'm thinking something like "moves to the squares (1,4) by making exactly three orthogonal and one diagonal step in any order, all in the same direction." Even that doesn't clearly exclude a move that only allows a single turn in the path
It would be easier if the vulture's description specified which paths it is allowed to follow. Maybe I'm the only one this is unclear to.
Hopefully the little bit of text I just added helps, at least a little.
It would be easier if the vulture's description specified which paths it is allowed to follow. Maybe I'm the only one this is unclear to.
Play Chess Variants with Jocly. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]false alarm : it was a cache issue
A. M. DeWitt wrote on Thu, May 2 04:55 PM UTC in reply to François Houdebert from 04:02 PM:Thanks. I know you may be a little frustrated, and I apologize if you are, but it is an unfortunate truth of development for my more complex games that updating them can be quite laborious and tedious, especially when several options exist for playing them. As a general rule, I want my games to be well-thought out and high in quality, so I am willing to make changes like this to try and make my games better.
Check your rabbit in daiseireigi. they are promoted by default in stag.
Can you elaborate further on this, please? I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
I did check the Running Rabbit in the diagram and the text, and everything seems to be in proper working order, including the text that shows the legal moves of the piece when clicked.
58 comments displayed
Permalink to the exact comments currently displayed.
Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.