Comments by arx

If I remember correctly, the PTA does that for all special King moves, such as castling.

Is it a matter of skill or a matter or perceived randomness?

I would ask that same question about nightriders, but they seem popular anyway. If I'm understanding you, the problem with Jokers is that they're too easy to exchange favorably because they're much stronger at the start than the end. I would expect that to be less of a problem with a very large game, since both players would have more opportunities to use their jokers.

If you're using it in a different armies game, the most important thing would be to have a joker in every army. Do you have an interactive diagram to show an example of a game where this piece might not work?

When fairychess is allowed to fill in the rules section for a game that uses svg piece images, some of the pieces end up being much larger than the others. This seems to be because the image is sized according to the piece name, even if the name is very long. Having the css explicitly set the image size could solve this.

Have you read Eric Silverman's thoughts on poweful pieces? He suggests that it's good to have a few super pieces that dominate the game.

When you say "larger boards" it's not clear if you're talking about the later mentioned 10x10 CWDA or something else. 10x10 doesn't seem large, and you did use the Joker on 10x10 and 12x12 already. If you are talking about something truly larger than 12x12, the obvious way is to have the Joker start at the back and make sure the average piece strength isn't too high.

If you're worried about the Joker dominating the game by being too powerful, don't forget that if it's really that strong the players would be reluctant to trade it away. In that way, strong pieces can be self-balancing.

I could imagine it possibly being a problem if the Joker loses strength quickly so that there's a large advantage in deploying one's Joker first, which would naturally favor the first to move. If that is a problem, a way to counter it would be to carefully choose the moves of the other pieces. Perhaps have more sliding or other blockable moves instead of leaping moves, to allow for pawns to reveal attacks on the Joker by weaker pieces that could be exchanged for it. Another way is to make sure that pieces have simple moves so that a player would be likely to have good options that limit the Joker.

Given that I usually call for "left" and "right" to be for placement, it may be better to reverse these moves. Opinions on that question are welcome.

My opinion is, don't leave it ambiguous! Even if you use it consistently it will be confusing. If the name refers to the location make it something like "Left Side Berolina Pawn" and if it refers to direction make it "Leftwards Berolina Pawn".

try now

I don't know why the images were like that, but I've redone it to use pngs instead of the svgs directly.

I'd like to make it work with alfaerie if you can suggest what images to use for the gold and silver pieces.

Most of them are just conversions of older alfaerie images and small modifications

Indeed I belong to those not digesting the "a" at all.

Think of a as a separator between two legs of the move, like an "and". In aW, the a implies that there are 2 legs and the W tells you what those legs are.

Perfect!

Could I have the ItemID of this page changed to match the changed title?

ZB appears in Grand Apothecary Chess-Modern

here and here

It would be nice to have a good Buffalo, but I haven't managed to draw it decently.

Thank you, that does work better; although I still don't get why the previous way wasn't working since I wasn't changing the pawn subroutine which seems to modify promotion options before the last rank.

Anyway, this reveals another, but more minor, problem, which is that when a pawn gets to the promotion zone the text in the option selection box is large enough that the lines overlap slightly.

I did copy from Gross chess. The descriptions should be fixed now

I've got some I think are mostly good enough. How should I send them?

There's a small mistake in fairychess. Wizard-Desc says "The %s Wizard may move" which would result in duplicating the piece name if shown.

I think this is it

aflafrafr(aflaflafrafr)Waflafr(afraflaflafr)Wafl(afrafraflafl)W(aflafrafrafl)Wafraflafl(afrafraflafl)Wafrafl(aflafrafrafl)Wafr(aflaflafrafr)W(afraflaflafr)W

No, should be this

Waflafrafr(alafrafr)Waflafr(afralafr)Wafl(afrafral)Wafraflafl(araflafl)Wafrafl(aflarafl)Wafr(aflaflar)W