Comments by benr

I enjoy variants whose only point is to explore some weird idea, but I don't think this brings enough to the table to publish. Only rooks and queens can cross the board (without adding some rules for facilitating automatic advancement of other pieces) and will get slaughtered by the opponent's remaining army.

I think I've seen a similar variant where the space between armies is actually infinite, but I can't immediately find it, and I don't know if there was a serious attempt at making it playable?

Since large primes are all odd, you're guaranteed to need an additional row to get the square coloring you're after.

The diagram with all the diagonal lines is too busy to be helpful, I think.

The notation would probably be better off without repeating the names of rows; I don't think the benefit of giving the consistent name to the orthogonal line is worth making the cell names non-unique.

The third bishop move diagram seems to be missing a marker at g9. If a bishop is on a6, does it move through b5(6?), c4(6?), d3(6?), then chooses between e7-f8-g9 or e2-f1-g0?

Your castling diagrams use black pieces the same color as the board, making it hard to see.

I don't think saying "knight moves one hippogonally" is enough. "Hippogonal" literally means knightwise, but that needs description for a new board.

Pawns can capture backwards? Please add that to the diagram then. What about diagonally "sideways", as in the triangular cells? En passant is allowed for triple and quadruple initial steps, in "the obvious" way?

I'm always a little wary about large piece-packed variants. Have you played this?

Not every visitor will understand the Betza notation; and while the interactive diagram helps, you should additionally include plain english descriptions for pieces.

The full-file rule seems clunky, but I guess it won't come into effect often. Maybe just allow no pawn creation in those rare cases, instead of making it an illegal move?

I would move all the "represented using ... from the second chess set" to the equipment section, leaving the Pieces section cleaner.

A couple of descriptions could use clarification. The "cannot be placed in check" description for the commoner might be misread to mean the opponent can't move to attack it. The knightrider's consecutive moves require empty intermediate square.

You can certainly edit the html file and send it to an editor to re-upload. To migrate it to a member submission would be nicer, but harder; if we created a member submission page and could attach the current itemID I think it would correctly assign favorites, comments, etc., but I'm not sure if lacking the MS prefix of a member submission would break anything? There are surely also absolute links to this page, so we'd need a redirect, but that's no problem.

Hi Daniel, sorry, those had slipped beyond my radar. I'll make another pass through the list when I can.

Hi Joe, this page's index entry got created but content was never written. Will you come back to it, or should we delete the index entry, or ...?

so is this OK for deletion, or can you clarify the rules (and upload the images directly here)?

This wasn't approved just now when I checked; since Fergus evidently meant to, I've approved it now.

But it's not clear to me from the description what happens when a king moves from the first or last rank: just no piece is created? And do I understand correctly that just moving a rook around the board will generate lots of queens? If so, it probably doesn't qualify for the Usual Equipment category.

The Horse movement image is not uploaded here. Oh, you had just linked to the wrong directory. Fixed and published.

After white negotiates its move with black's response, if black gets to negotiate next then black will have two consecutive moves (the reaction to white's, then their own proposed move), so it seems n=1 is not quite the same as ordinary chess. Or have I misunderstood the proposal?

The links to favorites are sometimes populated with just chessvariants.com/rules/. I didn't notice this on the overall favorites listing page, but did on the Games->YourFavorites menu and my personal information page's listing, in both places TessChess (among others) failing to link correctly.

The correct external link page for All the King's Men is https://www.chessvariants.com/link/pcAlltheKingsMen (a semantic version of https://www.chessvariants.com/index/external.php?itemid=pcAlltheKingsMen).

There Jelliss references himself in a '73 The Problemist article, which somewhat remarkably are available online at https://www.theproblemist.org/mags.pl?type=tp. Clicking and searching through the issues, I find Ski pieces defined on page 387 of the November/December issue 285.

Bn Em points out a similar issue with link pages in this comment.

I've converted this article to a member-submitted one; i.e., it is now database-stored rather than hard html-stored.

@Jean-Louis, you should be able to edit this using the site forms.
@everyone, let me know if there are any issues with this migration. It should have inherited all the favorites, comments, index entries, etc. (it has the old ItemID).

The old page has been renamed to /large.dir/shako-old.html for reference; anyone attempting to reach /large.dir/shako.html will receive a 404 error page that includes a link to the location of this member submission.

Thanks to Fergus for improving the migration methodology I had discussed earlier in this thread!

I'd suggest to move the link to your blog into this page, and delete the external link page.

You don't say here, but from playing one of the versions linked in your blog, it appears the same piece can be moved multiple times. That's worth saying explicitly, since that is one of the main things that differentiates some multi-move variants.

The immobilizer works for me when moving pieces around, but not when playing against the AI.

I've taken a stab at clarifying the 64+16 rule, please check that it is what was intended. I also cleaned up grammar in a few places (though it looks like someone else had a pass a the same today?).

Interesting!

I'm reminded of the #Powerup-Zone tag, but this doesn't fit there. There's also Lumberjack which is sort of a simpler version of this, and of course Smess.

I don't think just changing the starting setup of Capablanca chess qualifies for publication, unless you can provide reasoning to support that the new setup is superior or at least leads to significantly different (and interesting) gameplay?

And of course you would need to complete/correct the description. Your other open submissions similarly lack substance and/or clarity of description.

I didn't really follow the discussion on this variant earlier, but gave the page a fresh read. I think I mostly get it now, except how capturing on a switch works. It might be clarified in the comments, but it should be made plain in the page text as well. (Perhaps it is there too and I have missed it and/or it wasn't quite clear enough.)

Let's say I have a piece on 4, and the opponent has a piece that can otherwise move to a4 but not 4. Can they capture (and if so where do they end their move) or not (if not, could they potentially continue moving through a4 past my piece? I'm not sure that makes sense for any piece at the edge of the board like this, so probably moot, but I'll ask in case)?

Same question reversing 4 and a4. (Now the last question certainly can apply, e.g. the opponent piece is a rook on a8.)

Several of the image files now appear to be missing.

Nice!

It's particularly interesting how some of the 1-piece endgames (rook, angel) end up looking like a classical one to force the king out of Earth and then having the friendly king deliver the final attack. (The angel's isn't completely clear to me, since the lone king may move to the underworld early to avoid the angel's attacks, but I guess that's a significant enough detriment that then the friendly king can manage on his own.)

I don't play much on GC, so I'm hesitant to make edits to the instructions or provide defaults on time controls, but I suspect Fergus or Greg would be amenable. My uninformed suggestion for a default setting would be something like grace_time=3days, spare_time=2months. The idea is to almost exclusively use grace time, but given substantive difficulties in life, a couple months of reserve time for the game. No bonus times or anything else, to keep it clean.

It'd almost be straightforward to force mate with two avatars (plus the friendly avatarius) occupying rook or queen cells in consecutive files, except for forcing the king away from the e file.

The two sides aren't symmetric: an avatar on the black queen-start cell d8 can move and remain queen-powered at f6 or g5, but one on the white queen-start cell d1 cannot. I wonder if exchanging the king and queen starting cells on the 8th rank (completing rotational symmetry for the whole board) would be better for both points.

I'm spinning off a discussion from Sac Chess around piece set images to a separate thread (moving the last two which didn't discuss Sac Chess at all, but leaving a couple that are split-subject).

what do you see as a disadvantage for using Interactive Diagrams as the main diagram? -- H.G. Muller

I see two minor downsides to the interactive diagram as the main/first/only setup display: it takes a little longer to load, and after making use of the interactivity it is no longer a setup diagram (requires a refresh, or is there a button for reset now?).

The interactive diagram has the benefit of also supplementing the Piece descriptions (position-specific and interaction-specific piece rules are needed in addition, and for accessibility a text move description should always appear) and giving some Playability.

What I think would be nice is to have buttons over the graphic which switch all page graphics between the options. -- Greg Strong

A graphics selection button would be nice, although of course it wouldn't apply to pages requiring (or otherwise using) custom images. Perhaps even better, we could take to setting some more user-specific configurations, and let a logged-in user automatically use their favored piece set when possible?

Fergus requested I use [abstract diagrams] Kevin Pacey

If I found the comments you're referring to, I wouldn't characterize it as a request, and I'm sorry if it came across as an editorial request. You should feel free to use whatever graphics you want. (I guess I should caveat that: we do strongly encourage using the site's tools when possible for consistency, and using piece graphics that are traditionally used for corresponding pieces.)

I've moved a couple of the last comments to a new thread: Setup graphics, piece sets

(I think I've fixed the subject title for comments in this thread; it wasn't an artifact of the site move, but rather of me not being thorough enough in database edits when I moved over the two first comments.)

I've added a link to What's New to the menu. It already appears on the home page under the Explore heading.

I don't understand the sample game in this page; quite possibly I'm missing something obvious. 7...Qxc6 balances material?

The moves aren't completely clear to me; some examples would probably help.

The sliders must reach an empty square beyond a single captured piece, I think? The knights can capture up to three pieces, but always move 2 then 1? The kings don't capture at all?

The diffs between page revisions don't seem to work anymore, possibly due to the server move. I get a short part of the introduction and no other text, and generally no highlighted diffs.

I suspect some people will still get along better with a WYSIWYG editor than with markdown, even with the quick guide. Is it worth considering other editors? There's StackExchange's open-source editor "Stacks-Editor," but it's quite new (still in an open beta?).

I agree that mangling whitespace, even when we generally prefer non-ASCII diagrams, is a serious offense.

From the chess StackExchange site comes this variant question: https://chess.stackexchange.com/q/41052/18278

To paraphrase very briefly: compound pieces seem to often have a synergy value of 1 (e.g. Q=R+B, v(Q)=9, v(R)+v(B)=8); do amphibians see a larger synergy bonus arising from their un-binding?

@Greg, leaving (at least) two spaces at the end of a line before a return renders a newline without a new paragraph.

E.g.,
Ben

I made a quick test submission and can confirm that text outside of paragraph tags disappears somewhere between the submission and the database. What changes happened with the addition of markdown as an option for MS pages, and to what extent does CKEditor interfere with the HTML option?

The Revisions for this page also look very strange, pegging loads of revisions to the same timestamp 2022-11-27 12:54:56. None of them load the wizard for me, but I'm on mobile right now.

I think the Elk is a great example where being able to move the piece around would be really helpful. No, the user might not start with the diagram and quickly figure out the pattern, but a static movement diagram leaves the user with the impression that it's just a rook (assuming it started on light). Reading the rules is required in either case, but with the ability to move the Elk in the movement diagram the user can verify that it's working as expected / that the user has understood the text.

Now, the actual ID is sufficient for this, and the movement diagram mode doesn't need this additional feature. But it seems an incremental improvement if it's not difficult to implement and doesn't confuse the interface too much.

@Jean-Louis A fair amount of the editorial work here can be done through the forms on this website, and so don't require file transfers and such. But updating an old html page requires that (or at least sending the html file to an editor who can), and migrating an html game page to the database requires that plus some more technical work.

Indeed, I must have done something wrong in the migration. At least the current home of the page in the database appears to be fine. But the old page /large.dir/tamerlane2.html tries to redirect to /rules/TamerlaneII (which I think should be correct; that's the ItemID I set up everywhere) but that gets a 404 as well; instead, I get access to the DB version of the page here at /invention/tamerlane2.
@Fergus?

Thanks Thomas, you're right. Neither of these tags should exist anyway, because item entries already store the number of rows and columns, and that's a better way to search for items.

We started to work on adding pieces to the database a couple of years ago, and I'd like to pick that back up. Eventually that would replace the piece tags here (at least, I think it would be better), but until we get scripts up for crowdsourcing the piece-game relation table, I think users adding tags like these will work, and we can migrate the information over later.

I'm not sure if this is due to the server move, but member-submission of External Link pages doesn't seem to be working. I started doing some debugging, and it seems to die in membersubmissions2.php when trying to execute the replaceitem query (but the error handling there doesn't trigger either), what is currently line 385.

@Jörg You can also get to same-board listings from the header menu, Related->Games on Same Board.

I just tried again, 7:44am CST, itemid MLlichess. I had added MSlichess before realizing I had forgotten to switch to a link item, so that's likely the problem, but I removed the Item and IndexEntry entries (and the MemberSubmissions never got created), and any other locations shouldn't affect the Replace into Item query?

Also, as someone else reported recently: I can't edit another test entry (MLtestlink) to have empty content, but without empty content I cannot use the forms to delete it. Which of these protections do we want to keep?

@Kevin, indeed GC presets aren't "Items" in the database, and so can't be favorited, commented on, tagged, etc. Perhaps some of that can be changed, but it would be a pretty big change. (I think favorites should be limited to games, but comments on a preset separate from the game make sense to me. I'm not sure about tags: I wouldn't want information duplicated between the game and the preset, but maybe there are sensible preset-specific tags? But then we'd have the same system for two disjoint sets of objects...)

As for searching for presets (without a Game or preset landing page*), maybe the /play/pbm/listgames.php script should take additional filtering options.

*That's another thing: the pairing of preset landing pages (MP... for member-submitted ones) with presets has always seemed redundant to me.

@Fergus, thanks! I had emptied boardrows in my submission.

I thought in the past I could put board rows/columns/levels/cells as empty and they'd populate as nulls. Either I'm wrong about that, or something has changed. I think being able to leave those fields blank for non-game pages is the most natural.

Should this script be calling update_row (or some other indexing func) instead of its ad hoc query?

The title of this page seems wrong on both counts: it is not infinite, and it is 4d, not 3d.

The introduction discusses infinite chess, but the eventual game description is clearly 4d (in an asymmetric, "2d+2d" way like Parton's Sphinx Chess).

It should be the same as for rows/columns in 2d hexagonal games, right? (I'm not sure if we have a consistent policy for that...)

4d games are rare enough that I wouldn't have bothered to add a database column. It will probably cause confusion for new authors. But there's already reason to expound on the categories and index information on special cases, maybe as tooltips plus a link to a page describing non-obvious conventions?

The queen and wizard don't slide then, correct?

Checkmate might be rather difficult here, but I haven't thought too much about it; the pieces are weaker than many 4D variants, but it's also a very small space.

Note that the knights cannot reach the centermost square. I was wrong here, see subsequent comments.

I cannot use the item quick-edit script (as an editor) because the form does not have the new BoardRealms input (though perhaps the quick edit can be deprecated now that the author list population isn't so slow), and the database apparently won't allow it to be null. Again, I really think allowing nulls for non-game items would be best, and BoardRealms should be defaulted to 1 in any forms.

No, rules 2-3 means that pieces cannot move from one "domain" to another except as in a 4d (asymmetric) game.

But it does look like I may have been wrong about the title: the domains are each infinite, while apparently the domains are supposed to be limited to an 8x8 grid.

Afaict the second part of the N's move is optional here[...]

Ah, you're absolutely right.

I did some minor editing (fixed the header levels, changed the origin of the berolina pawn, shrank the custom setup image). The en passant rule "same as Horizon" should be explicitly spelled out on this page, please.

Any updates here?

Do you mean white (er...blue?) pieces don't give check except when they are on ranks 4-7?

What do you think about the volatility of facing rooks and queens?

This reminds me a little of the Unreal-Tournament-inspired Domination Chess.

white (blue) can put the king in check on ranks 5-7

I wonder how hard mate will be; you can't get very close to the king while still giving check, so a rook/queen net seems the only way, but with all the other pieces getting in the way...
On the other hand, maybe all the other pieces actually help? A sample mate (preferably one arising from actual play) would be helpful.

In Borderline, capturing pieces is excluded

Oh boy, sorry. Maybe add that all-important bit as the first bulleted Rule so skimmers like me don't miss/forget it from the intro (ugh, and even the short description, maybe it's just me)?

missing description of the pieces

@Fergus, the sections aside from Introduction are empty, yet the display script is not hiding them as usual. Any idea why?

@Eric, I had to fix most of the index information you provided.

The third sentence of the archer's description is incomplete.

I tried to set Begnis as the inventor. That field seems to have populated, but the edit person script appears to still not work. I can try again later if Fergus (or another) doesn't beat me to it.

Fergus, you were able to see proper sql error messages in the logs before; can you get those to print in the helper function?

I think we use 0 for infinite/indeterminate.

P.S. Those empty comments were me trying to insert this comment while I was not logged in, which may be the result of a bug.

Comments from non-(signed-in-)users display empty until an editor approves them, or a certain amount of time passes. They used to display a message to that effect; I'm not sure when or why that changed.

I deleted the copies of this comment.

A Zillions page here needs to have the zrf included (or a url to such, but I think the actual file is beneficial for preservation).

Since people keep wanting to use tags for information that is already stored in the database, I have modified the footer script to include categories and board dimensions just above the tags section.

Did any of the folks interested in board size tags still find them useful after this addition, or can we delete them?

Even if you would only allow combinations of two

This seems to be the case, see the references to "basic" pieces as opposed to "queens".

[...] you would still have 6x5 = 30 combination pieces.

Half that, since the order of specification doesn't matter. The article mentions 15 pieces in the values section. (Still a lot of names, granted.)

But what do these add, now with board size specified and linked at the bottom of pages?

@Kevin, you did indeed upload the image; all that remained was to edit the page's content to update the IMG SRC tag to use the new URL (visible in the file manager where you uploaded it).

@Fergus, the third rule means the king isn't under attack from the starting position.

I'm able to use the applets in Chrome with the CheerpJ Applet Runner extension.

I know eventually all these workarounds will fail and these applets will be forever unplayable. And indeed there are increasingly good ways to keep playing many of the variants elsewhere. But Ed's applets (on his own website) were my first introduction to variants, and I'll be sad when I can't play them anymore.

This first page of the member submitted item process has an ItemID, so it can be commented on, but they don't display at the bottom of the page (I added the comment through the Info page). I'm fine either way there.

But it also displays the Tags snippet, which has been misleading users into thinking they can tag their new submission.

At first I figured this was just another "haha, it's big and there are a ton of pieces", but then I got to the Progressive part. I'm not sure if that saves the game, but it at least makes it worth asking about; your example games link doesn't work (and strikes me as a little sketchy anyway).

If it were possible to attach such a file here, I would gladly do it.

Under the Edit menu, Upload or Manage Files.

The first experimental correspondence tournament has recently ended and I have the results of all 42 games with diagrams. If you want I can send it to you. [...] Judging by the results of the tournament, many players, even of a decent level, were confused and did not find the right tactics and strategy over the board.

That would be nice. Send to [email protected] so other editors can see it if they'd like. Probably putting in the page one particularly illuminating example game would also be nice.

I agree that the empty board should be removed. The large blue area is due to putting too large a number of empty spaces (made blue rather than board spaces by the limit to number of rows): replacing the 384 at the beginning of the code string by 96 should work. For file labels that's a parameter in the diagram designer (and resulting image url string) and can easily be fixed, but it's worth saying something in the text: you want to skip x so that capture notation doesn't conflict.

Also, there's an odd pattern of blue strips between some rows and columns. Changing the scale parameter to 60 seems to fix it; other numbers give different patterns. Probably better is to use the default scale for the diagram designer, but then scale it down in the page.

But is there some motivation for this game? There are other games that just push together multiple boards & piece sets. Does this one stand out as better in some way? Why so much space behind the pieces?

For reference, Betza has a (unofficial/untested?) Chess-with-different-armies team with an amazon; he just limits the rooks to R4 and keeps the other pieces:

https://www.chessvariants.org/d.betza/chessvar/cvda/amazon.html

I had asked about motivation, and you gave some, and Greg added a good point about bishops really benefiting from the large back space (as opposed to the 1-2 rows in other variants). I do share his concern for the outside knights (and really, all of them to a lesser extent).

I'm publishing this now, but I would suggest adding into the text somewhere about the motivation, and the use of the large rear space benefiting bishops in particular.

I had tried to help with the graphic, but Greg has gone a step further and implemented it, so again thanks to him.