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Comments by UriBruck

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Attendance Chess. 10 piece types that can move to 10 squares each, mostly. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Uri Bruck wrote on Thu, Jul 7, 2005 11:33 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
I'm not going to go all math and discuss what learning curves are or what
they should be. I played this game face-to-face, and I found it very easy
to learn, play, and enjoy. Usually it takes me awhile to learn games with
many different piece types, especialy when many of the pieces are
combo-pieces, or extermely powerful pieces. 
I can probably conjecture until the sun comes as to why I found this game
relatively easy to learn. Could be the simple patterns of the legal moves
of the pieces, or the fact that even some of the 'new' pieces are minor
variants of existing pieces. Could be the ASCII art for all I know. 
The thing is, I found it easy to learn.

Uri Bruck wrote on Fri, May 6, 2005 03:06 PM UTC:
That previous comments was by me.

Pawn Less Chess. New pieces, no pawns, and 20 squares removed from the 8 by 8 board. (8x8, Cells: 44) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Uri Bruck wrote on Sun, Aug 8, 2004 03:04 PM UTC:
Initially I added the special move as an aid in development. It gets the
short range pieces out there quickly, and being non-capturing, they get a
little extra power, but not enough to topple the board. 
This addition was the big leap during development. The move can also come
in useful later, and towards the end game it become less significant as
there are fewer pieces to jump over.
Something similar was suggested to me during development. I don't think
it would add much to this particular game, however, I think it's
something I might adopt on a larger board.

💡📝Uri Bruck wrote on Sat, Jul 17, 2004 05:22 PM UTC:
I discovered an omission in my description of the non-capturing leaping
move for the Wazir and Ferz. It was my intent that they should only be
able to leap over a friendly adjacent Ferz or Wazir. Thus, the paragraph
describing this move should read:
'
The additional non-capturing move is the same for both pieces: A
LeapingFerz or a LeapingWazir, may leap over an orthogonally adjacent
friendly LeapingWazir to the next square, provided it's unoccupied. A
LeapingFerz or a LeapingWazir may leap over a diagonally adjacent friendly
LeapingFerz to the next square, provided it's empty.
'

The Zillions implementation plays this move correctly

💡📝Uri Bruck wrote on Sat, May 8, 2004 11:32 AM UTC:
I didn't encounter that problem

Nahbi Chess. Variant on 10 by 10 board with equator, Nahbi's and Archers. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Uri Bruck wrote on Thu, Jan 29, 2004 04:28 PM UTC:

Tridimensional Chess (Star Trek). Three-dimensional chess from Star Trek. (7x(), Cells: 64) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Uri Bruck wrote on Mon, Jul 14, 2003 04:18 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Hi,
For rules written by Anderw Bartmess, same person who wrote them for the
Poster Book, look here:
http://www.grigor.org/startrek.htm

Cross-Eyed Chess. Two player variant on cross-shaped board. (12x12, Cells: 84) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Uri Bruck wrote on Wed, Dec 11, 2002 09:29 AM UTC:
The quote from Double King Chess looks like a good description of checkmating both kings simultaneously.

💡📝Uri Bruck wrote on Tue, Dec 10, 2002 03:04 PM UTC:
Hello Dan,
First, thank you for taking the time to do the Zillions implementation.
I'll start with your first question:
'It seems to me that if the
second King can be checkmated, it can never be captured.  Are there
circumstances in which the remaining King can be captured?'

If a single king is checkmated, it means that there is no legal move to
take it out of check, however 'The king is the standard chess king, with
the exception that it may be moved into check, and it may be captured.'
It's ok for the checkmated player to make another move that will leave the
king in check, and then the king will be captured on the next turn.

At first it might not seem to make sense to allow a king to move into
check, and if you have just one left, it doesn't. Even if you have both of
them it's still not a great move, unless it happens to be a winning move -
a move that checkmates the other player. With two kings vs. one, the
situation could arise.
So capturing one king and checkmating the other is really the same as
capturing both kings, checkmating the second just means the second capture
is inevitable. If it's easy to code this, fine, if not, then that's fine
too, because it amounts to the same thing.

As for the third win condition, I haven't done any Zillions programming,
although I've read the manual and some code. Without seeing the code it's
difficult to answer. Perhaps the best answer I can give is that I prefer
people to playtest the game as it was submitted, but if you think it would
impact the AI, you can implement it one way, and then add the other
implementation as a variant. Then even if the AI in the 'official' version
is weakened, people can still playtest that version playing one another
on-line.

Alfil. Jumps two diagonally (see Alfil).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Uri Bruck wrote on Tue, Sep 10, 2002 05:48 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
When names move from one language to another, then articles like the
definite article sometimes just stick to them. I've seen quite a few place
names in the south of Spain, for instance, that have names beginign with
'Al-', obviously the Arabic definite article.
'Alfil' is the name the piece acquired in Europe. The fact that the text
mentions it is good enough.
The Arabic 'fil' is also related to the Hebrew 'pil', which can be found
in the Mishna, dating back to the first couple of centuries C.E., and
which the Even-Shoshan Hebrew dictionary traces back to teh Akkadian
'pilu'.
The chess piece was obviously named for the Arabic word.

Ackanomic PartyChess. Multiplayer chess inside a `Nomic' game.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
📝Uri Bruck wrote on Sun, Jun 30, 2002 07:44 PM UTC:
This page gives a description of the original rules of the game. Since it was only played within the context of a nomic game 'lasting forever' was not an issue at first. Later ammendments did provide for winning conditions.

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