Comments by ChessShogi

The main reason I gave the name "Decimal Chess" to this variant  because I did not find any Chess variant that went by that name. I  wanted to avoid stealing the name of another game and including any part of my name when naming the game. I wanted to give the game a name that referenced the size of the board, but I couldn't a good alternative. I will put a note on the page to avoid confusion until I decide on an alternative.

When I designed Yangsi, I did so with the principles in Fergus Duniho's On Designing Good Chess Variants in mind. I have actually playtested this game several times. The people I played the game with all thought it was fun and very playable. I remember one particularly enjoyable game I played where I had a bare King and my opponent had a king and two pawns. That game ended in a draw via stalemate.

The name has been finalized (finally!). Many thanks to H. G. Muller for suggesting the name.

Increasing the board size does give the pieces more freedom of movement, Mr. Duniho, but it also does another thing - it makes it harder to keep track of everything. You yourself have stated this in your article "On Designing Good Chess Variants" in the section "Don't make your game too small or too large."

"Small games can finish too quickly, and large games can last too long. Note that the three classics are on moderate sized boards, ranging in size from 8x8 for Chess to 9x10 for Xiang Qi. 10x10 has proven a good size for many games, though 12x12 and up might be too large. I have recently (November 2009) created a 12x12 variant called Gross Chess. To some extent, this is an experiment with a board of this size. The only pieces it adds have been tried and tested in other variants, which allows the game to be a test mainly of the increased board size. Games against Zillions of Games suggest that the game is enjoyable but the larger size makes it harder to keep track of everything. I haven't yet won a game against Zillions without taking back moves. I have played a couple games on Game Courier, drawing one game and losing the other."

As for your comments on piece density, I don't think that cramming the pieces together within a 10x10 space will create too many problems. Kevin Pacey's Sac Chess also has a piece density of 60% at the start of the game, and is one of the top 50 games on Game Courier.

Note to editors: The site name for this page is incorrect. It should be https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/futashikana-shogi instead of https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dacimal-chess. As this page hasn't been approved yet, the change can be made without any trouble.

I would love to be a part of this event. My favorite variants that are currently on the list are (in no particular order) Sac Chess, Colossus, Opulent Chess, Gross Chess, and Hectochess. Also, on a side note, I tend to not favor games that are not much like chess, escpecially if their rules are complicated like they are in Decima or if their presets don't contain full rule enforcement.

These diagrams are a wonderful thing. They can easily describe various moves that Game Courier can't handle without using complicated code. However, I have a few suggestions that, in my opinion, would make the diagram even better.

• Tame pieces - The modifier t on a final (or only) leg of a move means that move cannot capture royal pieces in XBoard. In other words, it is the opposite of the modifier k on a final (or only) leg of a move, which means that move can only be used to capture royal pieces. This modifier should be relatively easy to implement.
• Custom definition of royal pieces - Currently, the only piece that is specified as royal by the diagram is the last piece on the diagram. Some variants may have more than one kind of royal piece (i.e. Chu Shogi), which makes this a useful extension, especially if the royal pieces must stay out of check.
• Triple Captures - This is without a doubtthe hardest extension to implement. Adding this would, in theory, require adding a lot more code to handle the second locust capture. However, this extension would be necessary for the Lion Dog, which can capture three pieces in a straight line, and other pieces that can capture three pieces at once. There might be a way to do this with the WierdChain function. However, that function hasn't been used in your diagrams other than in the Paco Shako diagram.

The rule for deciding who moves first is no longer a part of this game, but I forgot to remove it from the Rules section. It has now been removed from both this page and the corresponding Game Courier presets.

Is there any way to make the applet recognize hopping pieces like Cannons (mRcpR) and Vaos (mBcpB)?

Interestingly, the diagram doesn't grey out the squares that would result in moving into check when the royal piece is a Universal Leaper (XBetza notation: U), like the Emperor in Maka dai dai Shogi.

I have beeen assigned to the second round games, but none of them are showing up on My Games on Game Courier. I eventually found them using search filters, but when I tried to move, I got a error message saying that the file for the game could not be found on the website. This happened to me for all three games. Any help I can get would be appreciated.

I also noticed another thing about the diagram that I thought was very weird. When the diagram has at least 73 different pieces it starts combining the IDs of the first 6 pieces and replacing the actual ID of the piece with those. Specifically, it does this for the first group of 6, and then it skips two pieces. This process repeats until all 6 IDs have been used (So if the first 6 IDs are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, the overwritten IDs would be 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, and so on all the way to 66). For example, the diagram in you page on Maka Dai Dai Shogi replaces the IDs of the Furious Fiend (+Ln), Buddhist Spirit (+DS), Teaching King (+Dv), Crown Prince (+DE), and Emperor (+K) with PP, PGB, PE, PSt, and PT, respectively. This is probably due to a bug in the source code, as I can't see any reason to think that it was intentional. However, this is only a guess. Do you have any suggestions as to what might be causing this?

After a period of experimentation and looking at the How to Program Multi-Move Variants for Game Courier documentation, I managed to create a preset for my game Suzumu Shogi that can enforce rules for piece movement, display legal moves, and correctly handle both single moves and double moves. I am quite proud of it, actually.

However, no matter how hard I try, I cannot get the preset to correctly handle all promotions. The systems I came up with could handle promotions after a single move, but when the preset used the askpromote command to determine a promotion after a double move, the code would exit with an error message where the last move made had the first move in the sequence repeated. Any advice on how I should handle this would be greatly appreciated.

The preset for the game can be found here (Note that it does not support promotions): https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DSuzumu+Shogi%26settings%3Ddefault

These are some very good questions. Here are my answers:

• When I said that the moves of the Fire Demons and the range-jumping generals were unplayable, I was talking about when I was still experimenting with piece moves. This was before I had even joined the Chess Variant Pages. Back then, the range-jumping pieces could only jump a single piece, and I was still experimenting with moves for the Fire Demon. I'll be honest with you - some of them got very crazy. At one time I gave it the move whose XBetza notation was the incredibly long 

  BsRvW5KaKaaKmabKcaibQ5cafKcafafKcafafafKcafafafafKafcabKafcafKafcafafKafcafafafKafafcabafKafafcabK

  afafcafKafafcafafKafafafcabafafKafafafcabafKafafafcabKafafafcafKafafafafcabafafafKafafafafcabafafK

  afafafafcabafKafafafafcabK.

  I know. It basically defies description.
  • I prefer the promotion rule from standard Shogi because not only is it much simpler to understand, it is also easier to program in Game Courier. By using the standard prommotion rule all I have to do is keep track of where the piece started and where the piece ended. If I would have used the Chu Shogi promotion rule, it would have made programming the Game Courier preset much more difficult, to say the least.
  • The reason the Fire Demon cannot jump is because allowing it to jump wouldn't fit well with the theme of the game being based on Tenjiku Shogi. Furthermore, this would potentially make the game of Mitsugumi Shogi (Suzumu Shogi's smaller counterpart) too fast-paced, even though there is only one Fire Demon in that game. Nonetheless, I have to admit that giving it the move you suggested, at least in Suzumu Shogi, could make for an interesting twist. Though I didn't really plan on giving the Fire Demon jumping moves, it's a good idea to think about.
  • Now that I think about it, I think you're right on this one. I'd say it's slightly more valuable than a single Great General or Vice General, and I definitely think it's more valuable than a Rook General or Bishop General.  Make no mistake though - even though it is not as powerful as it is in Tenjiku Shogi, the Fire Demon is still a force to be reckoned with. As for the values of the Lion Hawk and the Queen, sure, the Queen can slide in all directions, but the Lion Hawk has a fully-fledged Lion move, plus the move of the Bishop. Because of this, I would, in many cases, find it hard to believe that the Lion Hawk is less valuable than the Queen in Suzumu Shogi. The only reason it would be less valuable in Tenjiku Shogi would be because you are using the TSA rules (Bishop + 2 square area move, rather than Bishop + Lion).

Fergus, I decided to try out your Extra Move Chess Preset, and when I did a pawn promotion with the extra move, the same error that occured when I tried to promote a Soaring Eagle after completing a double move with the mouse popped up, albeit in a different form.

BANNED INPUT: k d7-e8; k d7-e8; p a2-a1; q-dest on turn 27:

MOVE: k d7-e8 and other moves to occupied spaces are banned here.

Now I have a very important question to ask: do commands like ask and askpromote only append one move to the list of past moves, or do they append something different? If the latter is the case, then that is the source of the problem. I think the askpromote command might be changing the move immediately preceding the promotion move to a list of all moves in the sequence, including the promotion move, and appending that after the choice is selected instead of just the single promotion move. This effect isn't noticeable with single move promotions because the move before the promotion move is the very first move, and because there is nothing before the first move, the sequence would remain in a legal format after the change.

I do not see any of the tournament games assigned to me. Make sure you used chessshogi instead of ChessShogi, otherwise I will not see the game. I'll put that in my about page for future reference.

If you were to capture both a Deva/Teaching King and a Dark Spirit/Buddhist Spirit with a multi-capturing piece such as a Lion or Lion Dog, which piece would you promote it to? The rules state that the promotions of these pieces are contagious, but do not elaborate on which promotion has priority when a multi-capturing piece captures a Deva/Teaching King and a Dark Spirit/Buddhist Spirit in a single move. See the promotion rules in Taishin Shogi for some possibilities.

When I try to promote a Dragon King, it promotes to a Tokin instead of a Soaring Eagle. However, this can be easily fixed by making the King the last piece and changing the parameters accordingly.

When I try to promote a Dragon King, it promotes to a Tokin instead of a Soaring Eagle. However, this can be easily fixed by making the King the last piece and changing the parameters accordingly.

When I try to promote a Flying Falcon, it promotes to a Tokin instead of a Tenacious Falcon. However, this can be easily fixed by making the King the last piece and changing the parameters accordingly.

About your idea of including piece descriptions in the piece table:

Overall, including piece descriptions in the piece table is a good idea that I think should be implemented. Here are my thoughts on it:

First and foremost, including piece descriptions for a piece in this way should be optional, so you don't have to do it for every single piece in the table, which would be quite tedious, especially for larger games like Hook Shogi and Taishin Shogi. Of course, you can put in default descriptions for predefined pieces, but the programmer should also have the ability to override these. For null descriptions you could simply replace the empty string with a hyphen.

Regarding implementation, I recommend putting all the piece descriptions in an array so you can use JavaScript variables to hold piece descriptions if need be. And when setting piece descriptions in the diagram script, I would suggest putting the descriptions after everything else in the colon-separated list, like so:

name:id:move:image:startingHand:description

This way already existing diagrams won't get screwed up by this new implementation.

If you do implement this, make sure to update this page to include information about it.

I managed to make rule-enforcing preset for this game. It enforces almost every rule in this article, from the piece moves down to the Fire Demon's burns. The only rule I could not implement was the rule regarding repeated board positions since it is very complex. So it is up to the players to abide by these.

You can find it here: https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DTenjiku+Shogi%26settings%3Dtenjiku

I managed to make a preset for this game which enforces all of the rules except for the repetition rule, which is simplified to awarding draws on fourfold repetitions.

You can find it here: https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Tenjiku+Shogi&settings=tenjiku

Whenever I search for something authored by me in Games for Game Courier using the letter index at the top, it doesn't show up the first time. When I go to another page and back, my pages show up as normal. It's very strange. Any idea as to what might be causing this?

One question. Let's say a Lion, Horned Falcon, or Soaring Eagle skips a turn inside its promotion zone (They are the only promotable pieces with this ability). Would that piece be allowed to promote after doing this?

In my rule-enforcing preset for this game, promoting a piece after it skips a turn is currently disallowed. This is because the preset is based on my rule-enforcing preset for Suzumu Shogi (a game which explicitly prohibits promoting after skipping a turn). However, historical sources (which are already terse and/or incomplete) do not elaborate on this particular situation as far as I know. Should I remove the code disallowing promotion after skipping a turn?

I wonder how you made Tiles-1 and Tiles-2 Shogi Pieces?

I am nearly finished making a Game Courier preset that enforces the rules of this game and displays legal moves. However, the Lion trading rules haven't been implemented yet because they are giving me some problems. Any ideas on how to solve this?

You can find the preset here: https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Chu+Shogi&settings=chu

The new file upload script is way better than what it was in the past, but whenever I try to delete an old image and upload a different image with the same name, the old image reappears instead.

The new AI is pretty impressive. But I must ask you something. As far as I know, there is no easy way to skip a turn with a multi-move piece has this ability. Can this be implemented?

Is there a way to have a piece jump 4 squares diagonally? As it is now, the diagram doesn't appear to have that option as a single move/atom.

I have one question about the rules regarding check. A few sources (i.e. the English Wikipedia page on Shogi) mention a rule against perpetual check, namely making perpetual check four times, or something similar. Yet most of the sources I found do not mention such a rule. So is this supposed rule against perpetual check really a thing?

The modifier x does not seem to work when used on a final leg, at least when it comes to highlighting a selected piece's moves. For example, when I give a piece the move xK and press its name to show its moves, it will show red capture moves, but that's it.

I am confused... When I clear my browser cache and wait a few days after updating my Shogi piece graphics, in some places, the graphics appear in their current form, and in others they appear in their original form. It seems like the images are refusing to update in some places. I've noticed the latter with the interactive diagrams on my articles for games I created (i.e. Suzumu Shogi, where the images in the Pieces section are up to date but the images in the interactive diagram are not) and when copying the image address and looking at the image that way. Any ideas as to what's causing this?

@Ilya Novikov I recently uploaded some Mnemonic and Pixilart Shogi pieces. Also, I removed the rule against perpetual check in both Futashikana Shogi and Shosu Shogi, so it might be a good idea to update the Zillions of Games pages about these games.

Edit: I also restored the original moves for the Side Soldier and Vertical Soldier and renamed a few pieces.

The newest diagram script has a script error. Here is the error message I got when putting a diagram using the new script into the repl.it IDE for HTML:

>
Script error.
>

Seems like the comment system received an update - an update that removed an option to delete comments that are empty strings, which could be problematic, since there are no easy ways to delete comments now. Also, I do not like the fact that we now have a simple text field rather than an HTML editor. This is a straight up downgrade from the old and much better system, since you now have to enter HTML tags by hand - tags that the old system took care of for you.

Perhaps you could add a function (i.e. IsPawn(p)) to allow certain pieces to promote on the last rank? That way you can still keep the option off but allow certain pieces to promote on the last rank if need be.

@Greg Strong Sorry for the late response, but I just added a link the Alfaerie Style preset, so you are welcome to rename my page to 'Chu Shogi' and hide the other two pages with (non-rule enforcing) Chu Shogi presets.

Great idea, but how would you even go about implementing that? For a game like Yangsi or regular Chess, it would be fairly simple, but for a game like Chu Shogi or Suzumu Shogi, or even regular Shogi, things become really complicated really quick. Chu Shogi and Suzumu Shogi have multi-moving pieces, which required specialized code to enforce properly, namely a modified version of the code in Extra Move Chess that can enforce single and double moves, as well as a special subroutine that determines if a piece moved to a square that allows it to move again. In Chu Shogi, even more specialized code is needed to enforce the Lion-trading rules. Same for regular Shogi, except the specialized code handles drops rather than multi-moving pieces. Thanks to this and the fact that XBetza notation and GAME Code are two wildly different things, it would be incredibly difficult to properly implement the full version of your idea. Still, adding a button that, at the very least, prints out GAME Code functions for each piece, would be a great addition to this page in my opinion.

The diagram seems to be having problems rendering anything larger than 8x8. The image is fine, but the diagram seems to freak out when rendering any board size larger than 8x8.

Did you get my message?

When I try to update the description for my upcoming tutorial on programming variants with multi-move pieces in Game Courier, the description still reads what it originally said when I first posted the article. It seems like the description is refusing to update even after I change the text in the What's New Text field. Any idea as to what's causing this?

I wonder if there is a way to delete old presets? If so, I would like the presets listed below deleted (TLDR - All of the presets listed here that redirect to something). All of them are mine, so you do not need someone else's permission to delete them.

• All of my presets for Chess on a 10x10 Board
• All of my presets for Decimal Chess
• My alfaerie preset for Dragon Chess
• My preset for Futaskikana Shogi
• My alfaerie preset for Hectochess
• My alfaerie preset for Ryugi
• My preset for Single-Capture Suzumu Shogi
• My promotest preset for Suzumu Shogi
• The alfaerie, blackabstract, blackalfaerie, whiteabstract, and whitealfaerie presets for Yangsi
• All of my presets for Yangsi (Black)
• All of my presets for Yangsi (White)

In an earlier comment you said you could build an AI that plays much stronger than the one you currently have implemented into the diagram. I know the AI in the diagram is intended to be weak, but maybe you could implement the stronger AI as a separate option and have an option to switch between weak and strong AI in the AI bar?

There is a bug in the rule-enforcement subroutines. The code won't allow any piece to be moved - it just exits with the error message "You cannot move opponent pieces." Luckily, tweaking the cond statement that controls this exit point should fix it easily. When using cond its important to know that it will evaluate the second and third operands before the first operand unless they are encapsulated in parentheses. I'm only guessing here, but I think if you change cond #player islower #mover isupper #mover to cond #player (islower #mover) (isupper #mover) it should work as intended.

I would also like to have descriptions changed for the following pages:

Gyaku-sama Shogi - Smaller version of Hanten Shogi. >> Smaller variant of Hanten Shogi on a 13x13 board.

Taishin Shogi - Enoumous variant of Suzumu Shogi based on Tai Shogi. >> Enormous variant of Suzumu Shogi based on Tai Shogi and Taikyoku Shogi.

I'll get to testing that bug right away.

I simply recreated my game Yangsi in the applet, clicked on the button for showing the Game Code, and copied the code into a makeshift preset for it. When I tried to move a piece, the program exited with the error message "you cannot move opponent pieces." I tried it as normal and after swapping the Post-Move sections, but the error persisted.

I fixed the preset. The option to pass the second part of a double move is now working properly.

Here's a preset I made using code from the Play-Test Applet:

Yangsi

When I click on a piece to move it in a Game Courier preset, the selected piece doesn't get surrounded by a black square. You can still tell which piece is selected by looking at the Moves Field though. Personally, I prefer to be able to see which piece I have selected on the board without having to refer to the Moves field.

There seems to be a bug in my rule-enforcing presets for large Shogi variants (except for Shosu Shogi) that makes the legal moves displayed for a piece repeat after ten squares. For example, in the Suzumu Shogi preset, if I click on the black Vice General in the starting position, Game Courier will display the normal legal move to 16e, but it will also show another legal move on 6e (which is still treated as illegal by the preset). I have no idea how this is happening, as I haven't changed the code for displaying legal moves (which is based on stalemated subroutines from teh chess3 and shogi include files) in any of these presets. Any help I can get would be greatly appreciated.

[Edit] I also found another bug that prevents Game Courier from displaying legal moves after trying to make an illegal move by the mouse and then cancelling it.

The rule against perpetual check was intentional back in 2019. It was meant to compensate for stalemate being a win for the stalemating player. In Chess, if you're in a lost position, then the stalemate rule can save you. The rule against perpetual check had the same purpose. However, I removed it from all of my Shogi variants some time ago, as I believed it would add nothing but confusion as to why someone lost a game.

I would like the presets listed below deleted. All of them are mine, so you do not need someone else's permission to delete them.

The default preset for Hanten Shogi

The default preset for Gyaku-sama Shogi

In case you are wondering why I want them deleted, I have decided to delete their related articles from the Chess Variant Pages, as I have lost interest in them.

In making my own interactive diagrams, I decided to add functions for getting FEN codes from board positions and loading positions from FEN codes. They work pretty flawlessly, provided you use an ID w/ at least one letter for each piece. It even works w/ multi-character IDs, which are enclosed in curly brackets in the FEN code.

I also made functions for getting and loading game moves using a more specialized notation, w/ each element of the move separated by hyphens. Though it isn't standard algebraic notation, I have tested this system and it works very well.

If you would like, I can send you a text document w/ the functions.

They actually managed to get the site back up. I though Jocly was permanently down.

This page is now finished and waiting to be approved.

Game Courier presets for my larger games are theoretically possible. I have the tools necessary, and creating the PHP file shouldn't be that hard, but I am unsure how I would get that to work. The sets that Game Courier currently has either don't have enough pieces, have pieces which don't accurately represent the pieces in my large shogi variants, or have pieces whose names are too complicated for me to effectively implement them into Game Courier.

That's not to say I don't want to make presets for these games. If I could create the proper PHP files for the pieces and get them added to Game Courier, that would allow me to create presets for these games with proper representation of the pieces, which would be great. If you are an editor, perhaps you could help me with that when I finish the PHP files?

As for Hanten Shogi and Gyaku-sama Shogi, I am in the process of reviving them.

I assume all piece moves are the same as in standard Shogi?

I will have the blue coloration come back sometime, although I will probably reverse the colors to save me time if I need to update any graphics.

Kyoto Shogi style switchbacks could be interesting. But there is a problem: the instant a Pawn or Drunk Elephant moves, it would be forced to promote, which boosts defense early on and makes the game less interesting in my opinion. Of course, this can be easily solved by including exceptions to this rule for those pieces, and providing some sort of visual cue to match. But to me, the condition that promotion/demotion only happens on captures makes more sense, as you would need less visual cues for it.

You can find the preset for Hanten shogi in the Computer Play section of the notes.

I've been working on a side project of mine called the Universal Chessboard, a stand-alone application designed to support as many chess variants as possible, within certain parameters. It is somewhat similar to and inspired by these interactive diagrams - for example it uses the same general format for its presets as the format that is used to parse these diagrams (albeit with some parameters added/missing/different). Although it is still very much in its infancy (as it is currently at version Alpha 0.0), it already has many basic features implemented. You can move pieces with the mouse or with text, navigate through the game, undo moves. reset the board, load board positions, load game presets, etc.

You can check out the application in its current state as an Eclipse IDE project or a runnable .jar file here: https://github.com/amdewitt/Universal-Chessboard.

I have a new piece set file for my large shogi variants that I want to test out in Game Courier. Who should I contact to get it uploaded to the site and linked to the list of piece sets?

Are you using the aliases as the piece IDs instead of the original piece IDs specified by the set file being used? If so, that will not work. You need to use the piece IDs originally specified by the set file, as the alias command only makes a visual change to the piece ID (it does not change the internal ID used in the code).

I would like to request that the presets default2 and promotest for Suzumu Shogi be deleted, as they are excess presets and no known games for Suzumu Shogi have been found. (promotest was made to try and work around an internal bug in Game Courier, and default2 was made when I thought I would need to update the default preset for the game, only to find that it was safe to change the original).

@Greg Strong and Ben Reiniger - Since you two seem to be the one that I should contact for uploading set files, should I send my set file to one of you via email? Also, would having a plus sign (+) in a piece label cause any problems for Game Courier? It seems to work fine when I use code in the presets to change the labels, but I want to make sure the same is true when there is a plus sign in the label coming from the set file, as all the promoted piece labels have plus signs in them.

I will only be sending the first one for now, as I want to make sure it works as intended before uploading the other two.

This is a very nice index you have so far. However, I noticed that Ryugi was missing. While it is admittedly not my favourite game, it is just as simple for AI to play as Yangsi, if not simpler. If you can add Ryugi to the list that would be great.

Also, my larger Shogi variants have diagrams that an AI can play as well, though not including these is sort of understandable, as the AI would of course take a very long time to make a move. I actually had the AI play a game of Taishin Shogi (my largest game) for the first 60 or so moves, and in the worst case it took upwards of 9 hours for the AI to make a move due to the sheer size and complexity of the game, which only increased as more moves were made, although this would theoretically lessen as the board thins.