Comments by benr
Is this meant to be unequal armies, the usual FIDE except swapping pieces for the queen? But some of the candidates are known to be significantly weaker than the queen...how balanced can these be?
As I can understand, you assume that my game seems to be too close to other existing variants, and maybe, it cannot be counted as a fully independent variant...
Ah, sorry, no, that was not my intended message. The board shape is enough IMO to warrant publication, since it limits the sort of "flanking" that rooks and queens gain in the hexagonally-shaped board of Glinsky/McCooey.
Let me try to clarify my intent. Hexagonal cells take some extrapolation from orthochess; the majority of variants (but not all!) agree on the basics (rooks and bishops, knights), and some (Glinsky!) differ on pawns, or sometimes kings. The next major splitting point is orientation (is forward an orthogonal direction or not), but again most variants agree on that. Within the large chunk of forward-oriented diagonal-attacking-pawns variants then, the only real differences are board size/shape, setup, pawn details (initial moves and promotion zone), and castling. So, I think it's nice to clarify quickly where a variant lives: this is one of those variants, not a "quirky" one with horizontally-oriented, or "weird" or "new" piece interpretations.
I'd like to point out that he was not first in creating the game that uses these rules, and I don't fully understand why his variant is mentioned instead of Shafran's version, which stands a little bit closer to my game
That's mostly a historical bias of this site I think: Glinsky's is probably the best-known, and McCooey's was introduced here, and so now the two Recognized/Primary links for the Hexagonal category are those. Perhaps we should add Shafran's game as a Recognized/Primary variant here in the hexagonal category?
I'll also mention that I'm not so familiar with hexagonal chess hierarchies and history, so I'm happy to be corrected on anything. Just to include them here, see also CECV chapter 22 and wikipedia.
Finally, I think the various claims like "the main difference is that my variant is actually playable" need some clarification. What is it about the different shape and setup that make this playable while all other hexagonal variants are not? At some point in your last comment you mention mismatched number of pawns and pieces, but that's hardly a disqualifier for me at least. Protected pawns, good and interesting openings, etc. would be more convincing to me. And yes, all that's subjective, but I think some discussion on the page (Notes section?) would be beneficial.
Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
I would encourage a more descriptive name. The earlier this is done the less work it involves.
Perhaps for easier comparison, here's a query that lists all hexagonal 3-to-6-player variants:
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php?category=Hexagonal&minnumplayers=3&maxnumplayers=6
(There may be some pages listed as primarily 2-player but with 3-player subvariants that this will not find. Dropping the maximum of 6 doesn't include any additional results.)
Am I correct that pieces all move as in McCooey's hexagonal chess? If it's close enough, maybe stating that together with any exceptions would help frame this variant's place relative the existing art?
(The obvious changes are the board and piece counts. You also allow castling.)
@QIDb602, please email one of the editors if you haven't already to try to track down what's going wrong.
Thanks! I've fixed those too.
@Albert, if you are logged in, you should see your user id listed at the bottom of the Step 1 form. Do you? (Indeed, there is never an option to select the user id; it only ever pulls from the login session variable.)
It's also possible you got logged out somehow between starting the Step 1 page and submission? (If you are not logged in and you try to navigate to the submission form, it shouldn't populate, instead issuing an error block "You must be signed in...".)
@Jean-Louis, you type drawn
into the Moves text field (instead of clicking anything).
@Jean-Louis, those carved pieces look great! Would you mind sometime adding an article including the images? (You can start it as a Game page, but we'd change the type over to Craft before publishing.)
Do I understand correctly that the edge pawns cannot promote without capturing? Is that a feature or a bug?
The file name did not match the URL; I've fixed that, and can download the zip (but don't have ZoG to test it).
This page currently has an absolute link to the .org version of mainquery.php
. For the page to work in both locations, a relative link would be better.
I tried to test that out on the .org site (new better testing practices, yay!), but found that I cannot log on there because the login page has an absolute url to the .com version of the login script.
Burninate all the absolute urls?
I did occasionally use the "info" page, previously linked to from the icon of an index entry. But I do not consider this worth keeping either. Those pages can still be reached from the "info" link in the footer of the item's actual page (except perhaps for multi-item pages?).
@Adam, we normally don't like to rename Items that have been around for a while (your rules page being from 2019); while we can automatically update comments, favorites, index entries, tags, and possibly groups (am I missing anything?), anybody else who has linked to your page would find their link broken.
I'm open to feedback on how best to manage this sort of thing. One possibility is to create a new Item with the new name, we can move over the references in the database I've mentioned, and leave the old page with just a link forwarding to the new page (possibly even an automatic redirect, though I'm not sure if that'd work in a member submission view script).
Published.
I changed the link Description (which appears in searches and next to the title in the comments, etc.) to be more descriptive, but let me know if you'd like it changed.
The red is because the text is now wrapped in an <a>
tag, and hovering over that changes the text color.
Could you make the same fix for the EGT.html page (as linked from the piececlopedia articles)?
I don't see a problem updating the page to give the correct probabilities, in percentages if you would prefer. If for some reason you really prefer "1/3", then please add "approximately" (and these comments can serve any curious visitor). I find the "1/3+1/36" part for capturing extremely confusing, because it suggests I am more likely rather than less to roll doubles?
I find the mathematical notation being used as bullet points distracting. I would also suggest moving the ≅ point being moved into a later section as an alternative rule.
I also find the many capitalizations, italicizations, and underlinings distracting; if you could try to minimize those a little I think you would more effectively emphasize fewer points.
The playable diagram (but not the statistics) seems to be allowing the defending king two moves each turn now. Chromev0.92 on Windows.
Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
The tag description page-scripts aren't working.
I used the Play-Test Applet, followed by some editing of the html. Specifically, since the queen doesn't appear in the initial setup, I needed to add it to the promotion choices, which subsequently required adding it to the piece list (hence its appearance last, which I didn't remember indicating royalty).
The Play-Test Applet also produced a more-verbose version of the piece descriptions than necessary, so I pruned those down based on viewing another of your posted diagrams. But then the issue with the knight came up, and it seemed that it needed the explicit id.
It seemed (though I went through many iterations, so perhaps there was some other issue) that the order I listed the promotion choices in mattered for which ones became available.
I've updated my previous comment to fix the royalty, and I cannot recreate the issue with promotion list order.
25 comments displayed
Permalink to the exact comments currently displayed.
I think it'd be worth adding some of that information into the page, the intro and/or notes sections. (E.g., "pieces move as in other standard [is 'standard' OK here?] hexagonal variants" and maybe "the board shape and setup are designed to be better balanced" in the intro, and the comparisons to other variants in the notes.)
The pawns' initial two-step could use a clarification on whether pawns that make an initial one-step but land still in the two-step "zone" are still admitted a subsequent two-step (it seems like yes?).