Comments by joejoyce

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Slow volunteers.

Got a problem with this game:
 /play/pbm/play.php?game=CaM%3A+A+Tale+of+Two+Countries+2&log=joejoyce-catsmas-2013-252-784&userid=joejoyce
Mark has not been able to make moves - he can't even always sign in. After
using his password to move for him, I had no trouble with his turn, but he
still did. Finally, this morning, he sent me a move where every piece he
moved disappeared from the board. What is going on? He is using Google
Chrome.

If you are interested in volunteering, please contact David Howe. 

I agree the site needs more conversation. If you go over the comments section you'll see there is a slow churn of members, or members designing and/or commenting. Look closer, and you'll see a core group several years ago that talked with each other, ran contests and group designs, and essentially had an acknowledged leader in Ralph Betza. A number of others have served as lesser activators for the site. But the main thing is that several people participated regularly or semi-regularly and there were a handful of interesting things, discussions, recent designs, contests... going on at more or less the same time. So a Ralph Betza is not required to have a good site* but group participation is. 

Who are the members of the group? Who will participate and follow through? 

A design contest is always fun - who will judge it? Based on my experience, it turns out you need several judges. You could have everyone in the contest judge all the entries except their own, which would relieve a lot of stress and pressure on the erstwhile judges and allow people to participate more fully. 

You can also run a set time tournament, where everyone starts with say 3 - 5 months of grace time, and nothing else. No time is ever added. This guarantees the tournament will end in 6 - 10 months. All games are played at once. Each player is assigned black in half the games at start, and white in the other half. Once the games start, all players must win, lose, draw, or time out in every game. It works, and prevents tournaments from going on for years. It works for small numbers. However, it is highly unlikely we would get so many participants that it would break the format.

Discuss this here, see who will commit to what, and we shall see what happens, if anything. I would not mind seeing this site a little livelier. Enjoy!

*Thank goodness, because Ralph is quite a hard act to follow, being a master in both chess and variants as well as a good writer, someone who could explain variants and analyze them for the rest of us.

Warning! The following cartoon contains checkers and may not be suitable
for under 18.

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Hey, HG, I agree with Antoine and Greg about board sizes, but I do have a suggestion that while a bit gimmicky might work. Add an extra square behind each king, place the lion there, and when the lion moves or is taken, the square (and any taking piece) is immediately removed. Hm, that would screw up your chess engines, wouldn't it? The other "preserve 8x8" option is a drop, but I do not favor that approach.

I've made my 1st move twice in this game, some days apart. It said the move
was sent both times, and both times, the game showed up later with my move
missing. Note this game allows 8 moves/player-turn. What's happening here?

     joejoyce-capnmunch-2013-287-056

Okay, you got me to dig out my complete set of Variant Chess issues. 

First: Refusal Chess [article by Paul Novak]

"Refusal Chess (also known as Rejection Chess or Outlaw Chess) was invented by C.H.O'D, Alexander... The only rule change from normal chess is that you may refuse one of your opponent's moves each turn (you cannot leave your king in check though and refuse your opponent's piece takes your king).

Since its conception two very similar siblings have appeared; that the number of refusals is limited; and where two moves are proposed together on each turn... 

Different pawn promotions count as different moves..."

So there is a confusion among similar games, which is causing the problem.

Based on my reading of this, a player may or may not refuse a move. So white is not obligated to refuse a move of black's. But black has the right to refuse white's move R-h5+. So white must make a different move. Still, any rook move on the H column would mate, except of course, R-h7. 

This does indicate a problem - if white did play R-h7+, could white then refuse k x R, leaving black no legal moves at all, and if so, would it be considered stalemate rather than checkmate? It's maybe slightly shaky logic, but not totally outside the realm of possibility.

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1062991/activator-game-design-contest-on-the-fly-updates

After all this time, I find VR Parton has already suggested 3 boards for Alice, with player choice of which of the 2 possible destination boards to end upon. And I found it here, on this site, in a spot I didn't know existed. http://www.chessvariants.org/parton/Curiouser&Curiouser.txt

I quote from page 10: 
"Alician Chess can also be played on three boards of identical size. In this case the player has now a choice between two corresponding squares to which the piece that he plays may be transferred, though of course one these may sometimes happen to be occupied, thus allowing no choice."

The link above the quote takes one to 31 pages of Parton's thoughts on Alice and various other variants, which he saw as related to Alice. I do not know if he ever made explicit that in Alice with 2 boards, the knights are colorbound, nor that giving one the choice of boards unbinds them. 

There is a comment on this idea that suggests a standard 8x8x3 3D chess board could be used, but then suggests a modification to 3-board Alice that would re-bind the knights, namely only allowing pieces on the center board to choose which of the other 2 boards to transfer to, and only allowing the top and bottom boards to transfer to the middle. This, I believe, only makes the colorbinding worse. (Sorry, Larry!)

Finally, I'd like to point out that the construction of this website presents a lot of "Secret Gardens" that are difficult to find, but once found offer a multitude of surprises.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qQ0GzYabEgk

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Two comments:

1) It's not specified if the colorbound bede can ignore pieces on the opposite color, or if those pieces block the bede's move.

2) How checkmatable is the king? It's an extremely powerful piece, and allowing it to move through check on the first step of its 2 step move makes it even more powerful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9IYRC7g2ICg

I'm looking for an app for an iPad that will allows someone to compose
Xiangqi problems on his iPad. Does anyone know of such an app? He is also
looking for colored Beijing fonts. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

If the author's conclusions in this article are accurate, then males
would
also be better at chess variants. Chess is chess, until it isn't. (How
many would recognize this game as a shatranj variant?
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1178742/some-impressions-after-playing-the-battle-of-macys)

However, I would take issue with at least some of the conclusions in the
article. The last 2 paragraphs of the article are:
"Males on average may have some innate advantages in developing chess
skill due to previous differing evolutionary pressures on the sexes.
Females may have greater talent on average in other domains, however. If
the male predominance in chess was due just to social factors it should
have greatly lessened or disappeared by now. Indeed, some researchers now
recognize that many psychological sex differences are due to complex
interactions between nature and nurture.

This conclusion is unpalatable to many but it is best to acknowledge how
the world actually is."

The idea that social factors are now balanced between men and women is a
stretch, one I do not agree with. I believe it's been demonstrated that
if
there is a difference between men and women in any area, a good part of
that difference *is* social conditioning. Encouragement and discouragement
in children is often quite subtle, and recent studies of films of classes,
for example, show this clearly. You want 2 kids who read the same to read
completely differently 5 years from now. Tell one kid (s)he is a good
reader and the other (s)he is a bad reader. Sometimes that's all it takes
to turn 2 average readers into non-average readers. If that isn't enough,
give the "good" reader encouragement and somewhat harder and harder
books
to read, and ask them what they liked and didn't like, and what they
learned.Give the "bad" reader very simple kids books to read, with
orders
to write book reports on them. Keep it up for a year, and see what happens
several years further on. Any bets?

I do not claim men and women are equal in everything, as that is obviously
wrong. I do not even claim that the difference shown in the article isn't
real. What I do claim is that the author never analyzed the male players
the way the female players were analyzed. Suppose only the top 5% of all
chessplaying men go on to get better, and the top 50% of women do. What
would that do to the conclusions? We know that women are discouraged from
things like chess, and men are encouraged to play things like chess, on
average. Finally, the little matter of sexual harassment also has a
bearing. Based on studies of women, any that rise are subjected to more
intense, more open, and more hidden harassment. In fact, you can see that
in the news, if you look. Just 1 example, the Gov. Christie bridge-closing
scandal was blamed entirely on a woman working directly for Christie by
the
lawyers Christie hired to "investigate". It seems she was having an
affair with another Christie top gun, and he dumped her, leaving her to
close the bridge in a fit of irrational female passion - all her fault,
because she was jilted.

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The best of luck with this.

I listed you as a contributor. You should now be able to submit variants
with no more than the usual amount of trouble. ;) Enjoy!

Thank you, Tony, for the comment and the rating. Sorry I didn't notice it when you posted it. You were partly responsible for my interest in shatranj variants, way back when. The games were fun to do and I got to "meet" Christian Freeling in the process.

Fwiw, being very bad with awkward pieces, like the half-duck (HFD), and being terrified of relatively cheap but unblockable pieces capable of attacking several pieces at once, like the squirrel (NAD), I tried to design simple, obvious pieces that were easy to use and to understand. I didn't want them too powerful, but they needed to be much more capable than the original piece mix. It's nice to see some of my games being played. Thanks.

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Thank you, Fergus.

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me - test 7 of comment system

How do you define a chess variant? While this may seem to be a somewhat
silly question, it bears directly on this topic. Over several years I
designed a series of games that got farther and farther away from standard
chess variants, starting with Chieftain Chess, a multi-move shatranj
variant (which for reasons of euphony was not called Chieftain Shatranj.)
During this development, the games crossed the line between chess and
wargames, thus managing to turn off both chess variantists and wargamers.
For each, the games were too much like the "other kind". But I think the
series clearly fits into the category of computer-resistant variants. 

The beginning of the series, which I developed and playtested here (thanks,
Nick Wolff and others) were expansions of Chieftain to larger boards and
more pieces, but still very much large shatranj variants with 1 new idea -
that "kings" could be multiple and would control their armies directly,
requiring the "king" to be within a few squares (command range) for a piece
to activate and move. This part of the series I developed with a friend,
and named it the Warlord games, an unfortunate choice, as that name was
already used by a commercial series of games. 

However, this worked well enough that I took the next step to create a true
chess-wargame fusion by adding terrain. In FIDE chess, "terrain" is totally
abstract, and is represented by the difference between dark and light
squares, because some pieces, bishop-types, can only move on one or the
other colored squares. I expanded from white and black to white and grey,
which all pieces can move upon, and brown and green, which restrict certain
pieces from moving onto them. The brown, green, and grey squares are
scattered across a mostly white board, and conceptually represent hills,
trees, and towns. This last part of the series, the "true wargame" part, I
have called the Command and Maneuver series, which is more  description of
the game than it is a name. My developer, Dave, worked on the first few of
these, but then moved away for a job, so I continued on my own.

The best well-playtested game in the series is The Battle of Macysburg.
It's played on a 32x32 board. Players bring 84 pieces on the board in 4
groups of 20 - 22 pieces each, coming in on Turns 1, 5, 15, and 20. There
are 2 times in the game where 1/3 of the captured pieces are brought back
as rallied troops, after turns 12 and 24. With a little care for
positioning of troops and leaders (activators/"little kings"), players can

move all their units each turn, if they so desire. There are 3 levels of
victory, ranging from driving out opponent pieces and occupying Macysburg
to chasing all the opponent's pieces off the board to destruction of the
opponent's army - reducing it to 20 pieces or less. Players may achieve
more than one level of victory, and players may each achieve some level of
victory in the same game. Yet the mechanics are simple chess moves of 1, 2,
or 3 squares for each piece, movement governed by the availability of
leaders within 2 squares of each moving piece as it starts its move. With
no wargamelike rules at all, just the rules mentioned above, the game
reproduces fairly nicely much of the strategy and tactics of Western
European combat around the 17th and 18th centuries. Mechanically, the game
is a chess variant; organizationally it's a wargame. If you consider it a
chess variant, Macysburg is computer-resistant.

This is a review of Macysburg, written by a wargamer and chess, but not
chess variant, player, complete with 2 "snapshots" of the game that give a
reasonable idea of how it looks:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1178742/some-impressions-after-playing-battle-macysburg-sc

Here's a simple board you can use - just remove my pieces for this unsuccessful game, and place your own. And welcome to the ranks of those who have tackled 4D chess! 

/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DChess+on+Two+Boards%26settings%3DC02B

Hi, Kevin. To get the game logs, click on the site logo in the upper lefthand corner of the page. That takes you to the home page. Scroll down until you see the "What's New" section. The top line under What's New is the last game move made. Click on that kink and it will bring you to the game logs. Type "Sac Chess" in the game box, set the Age box to however far you want to go back and look - say 4 weeks. Then set the status to "Any Games", and click the "submit" button. This will bring up all the games of Sac Chess that were played in the last 4 weeks. You will get the current game between Carlos and Fergus and you will get their finished game. Note the game box is case sensitive. If you type "sac chess" or Sac chess", you will not see any games. Putting your user ID in will bring up just the games you've played in the last 4 weeks. You can use wild cards: putting "Sac *" or Sac*" will also get you those games, as will "Sa*". Typing just "S*" will bring up Seirawan, Shogi... also.
*******EDIT:
I see Carlos already gave you the short course.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/21/chess-forbidden-in-islam-rules-saudi-arabia-grand-mufti

Thanks for the comment, Kevin. Checkmate is one of the trickier parts of higher-dimensional chess. The standard method for K + Q vs K in 4D is to move the king to the/a middle square, then move your queen between your king and the enemy king, pinning it against the edge of the board. But this only works if your individual "little" boards are no bigger than 5x5. My method, by restricting diagonal moves greatly and introducing the "held king" concept, will work on any size (rectangular) "little board". It allows forced mate with K and any 2 of the Q and pair of Bs vs. a lone K. And it took a little help, as Abdul-Rahman Sibahi gave me the final piece of the hold rule - that it works on the individual matching squares in each little board. A version of the hold rules can be applied to any higher than 2D variant, though it might well have to be tweaked to fit each higher dimension. 

I like this design because it is humanly playable, looks like chess, and gives people the feel of 4D and the pieces the freedom to move through 4D space without overwhelming the players with 3D and 4D diagonals, or very many of the available 2D diagonals, for that matter. Most who design 4D chess variants using the 2D layout of 2D boards to represent 4D space give the pieces moves that are based on a 4D space that is 2D x 2D = 4D. I've found this creates a totally chaotic game, where the state of the board cannot be reasonably projected even 2 or 3 turns into the future. Pieces move so freely that in a couple moves, they can be anywhere on the board, generally by many paths which can't all possibly be guarded in 2 or 3 moves. So I get my 4D by basing movement on a 2D + 2D = 4D concept. It gives you the same 4D game space, but it restricts movements to fairly easily visualizable, fairly simple patterns that players can project 2 - 3 moves into the future. While it is fast-moving, it is not chaotic. 

Almost nobody plays it, or ever has. Grin, that's the common fate of most variants. But getting it to work, finally, taught me something about chess design. For one thing, your pawns are there as much or more to protect your opponent's pieces as yours. And the checkmate problem in higher-D chess is merely a symptom of the chaos problem in higher-D chesses. The attempt to reduce chaos is part of what led me to short-range pieces. Restricting board size only limits the number of chaotic states that can occur, bringing it down from the all-but-infinite to a smaller but still effectively infinite number in terms of human lifetimes, as individuals or as a species.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541276/deep-learning-machine-teaches-itself-chess-in-72-hours-plays-at-international-master/

"Fergus Duniho Verified as Fergus Duniho wrote on 2016-04-12 None

The Preview and Verify mode now has a Cancel button. This is like clicking the back button, but it preserves any comments you have written, and if you're in a multi-move game, such as Extra Move Chess, it will cancel the whole move at once. The main reason I added this was because I didn't like having my comments go away every time I decided against a move."

Thank you very much - I got burned by that little feature more than once myself. I'm sure others have, also. I like what's been happening here lately.

Thank you, Jose, for the comment, rating, and especially the preset. Modern Shatranj is my simplest and in many ways most successful design. Grin, there's probably a lesson there. As for the shift in promotion rules, I consider games to be a collaboration between at least 2 people, the designer and the player(s), so "adjusting" a rule to suit the player(s) is okay with me. Just means someone is interested enough to try a game. Thanks again.

Hi, Kevin. Regarding playtesting all posted games, I'd like to offer some comments. In general, there are very few people who play chess variants. This is a sad fact of life. And of those who do play variants, only a subset are of value as playtesters. How do you find them?

Often, you find hem by posting a game and seeing if people will play it. My experience has been about as contrarian as many of my views. The games I posted without any playtesting have in general done better than the games I've posted after playtesting. Nobody plays Hyperchess or my "activator" variants, which have been fairly extensively playtested. My shatranj variants not only get played on occasion, some people even like them! They were not playtested at all before posting, because I knew they would work, and I didn't really have anybody to playtest them with, except people here.

Yes, playtesting will eliminate a lot of unplayable games.But it would eliminate such gems as Salmon P. Chess or Stanley Random, also. And it would eliminate a lot of games that may have flaws, even major ones, but also have an idea that is worth saving. Of course, I have a prejudice toward more ideas, not fewer. Not everyone agrees with me. ;)

Hi, Greg, thanks for the comment and rating. And it's nice to see some of the old gang around. To fully answer your comment, I think we'd need the 3rd shatranjeer, David P. He was the one who said it was a variant if I added promotion rules!

I've always considered games to be a collaboration between at least 2 people, the designer and the player(s). While I designed it to be a bridge between shatranj and modern chess, and so split the difference between no promo to lost pieces and unlimited pieces of any non-royal type, I certainly have no objections if people play it with promotions only to general. The only real effect it would have on the games is to extend the games with promotions a bit, because the generals are slow compared to the other pieces. 

Finally, grin, how do you tell from the current state of the board if a pawn can be captured en passant? ;)

Kevin, I keep the slide rule I used in college under an abacus on my encyclopedia bookshelves. I don't program. All my presets are bare bones board and pieces. I am a dinosaur. Gronk! ;) Seriously, I am perfectly happy with a board and pieces, it's all you need. And most games here don't have a preset, which I see meaning 1 of 2 things, they're dinosaurs like me or they aren't serious game designers. Maybe it's just because they don't believe enough in their games, but if you don't make a preset, nobody will play your game. So what you're offering is an idea, not actually a game. You are still participating in the conversation, but at a lower level, and are much less likely to get your say.

The question of how FIDE chess skills transfer is an interesting one, and is related to the value of variants in playing better FIDE. To an extent, I think it depends on how flexible as a person one is. It's been my experience that the skills can transfer well and transfer better the closer to FIDE a game is. Grin, if you want to try an experiment, play Grand Chess, Modern Shatranj, Xiang Qi, Shogi, and Jetan, and see what you think. I believe experience helps, and the broader the experience, the more help it can provide. I learned more about pawns in designing and developing Hyperchess and playing Grand Shatranj than I ever did playing and studying FIDE. (Well, and Texas Two-Step...) Until then, I didn't even realize that there was more to learn about pawns. So I am definitely in the camp that says the more diferent kinds of chess you play, the better you will play all of them.

I believe you're right about the splits in variantists' preferred games - there are many. Some games, like Bughouse or Grand Chess, have their dedicated adherents. I've also noticed designer styles generally reflect the kinds of games they like playing. But that's not only an obvious but a very blurry observation because variants are so varied. Currently there are some 5000 or so variants listed, and roughly 1000 have presets. Logistically, most people are forced to "specialize". But many who do play variants, play only 1 or 2 exclusively. I don't see that as much different than only playing FIDE.

Thank you for the comment, HG. It seems to be unanimous that promotion should only be to general. Vox populi, vox Dei! It is changed. ;)

Actually, from what I've seen, there is a lot of truth to it, but less so now than previously, I think. The standard attitude among chess teachers was that variants are bad because they take valuable training time away from learning FIDE. Now bughouse is fairly popular at chess clubs. I saw it being played a decade or so ago myself. And I've heard (read) that other FIDE-like games are being played a little. Plus the internet has opened up the world of variants to the world, if anyone bothers to look for it. So I do think we will see more variants being played. And I also think, for what that's worth, playing variants does improve your FIDE game - at least, most variants, because you need "chess thinking" to play them. There are variants which take you so far from standard chess you are no longer using chess thought, or just chess thought, to play the games.

Once again I find myself with a game that needs to be posted, and this one isn't even my style. Most commenters and players here seem to like very powerful long-range pieces on boards no bigger than 10x10. In particular over the years, Carlos Cetina and Jeremy Good have pushed me in that direction more than anyone else. A couple days ago, I was looking over Kevin Pacey's movement diagram for the Flying Dragon in Butterfly Chess:

If you push this idea to the limit, you get a white "bishop" that hits every single white square every single turn, and if you make it unblockable, you have a white missile. You can't make it completely unblockable, because on a FIDE board, 1. f1-e8 checkmate! And that board is still a bit small. So use Grand Chess as the vehicle. All the pieces keep their moves, though they may not start on the same squares. All the pieces get an extra power.

(pardon for the clumsy pix - modern tech and I fight...)

Clearly you have to restrict the missiles. Let the rooks be anti-missile batteries. No missile may land within 2 squares of a friendly rook. Add this power to the queen, chancellor, and archbishop, also.

Restricting missiles further, bishops may only be used as missiles from their original squares. They may move off and back on again, and still fire.

A bishop fired as a missile is destroyed on impact, and a new bishop/missile is placed on the original bishop's square. While each side may only ever have 1 bishop of each color on the board at any time, there is no limit to the number of missiles that can be fired and replaced.

Now missiles are too powerful, so they are restricted again. A missile must be fired by one of the 3 major pieces, Q, A, or C, which must be directly behind the bishop to fire and replace it.

Now the initial set-up is shifted slightly by moving 2 of the major pieces directly behind the 2 bishops, sliding the kings 1 square right in the above diagram, and placing the 3rd major piece on the vacated king's square.

Now we mess with the knights. In addition to their standard move, they gain the cannon attack. They may move any number of squares orthogonally, jump over a piece, and capture the next piece along that file or rank.

This is as far as I've gotten. The defense for 1. Nb2-a4 is to drop a missile on the knight. Note missiles can only hit pawns, knights, bishops, and kings, and none of the major pieces, the ones that can force mate with the king, at this point. Comments? Suggestions?

Happy Hanukkah!

I gave 3 or 4 people new passwords recently because they had the same problem as HG Muller. Their new passwords work just fine. It's either quite a coincidence or an odd little problem cropped up. To those whose passwords I changed in the past few weeks, has anybody tried to change the new password?

Thank you for the comment and rating, Kevin. Regardless of the exact value of the "minor" pieces, they are all within a point of each other, allowing fairly free exchanges among the pieces, and sometimes giving the end of the game a "different armies" feel, where a pair of elephants face a knight and general, for example.

In shatranj, there are 3 "levels" of even exchange, between pawns, between minor pieces, and between rooks. Modern chess adds the queen exchange for a 4th level. There are several "queen-level" pieces, from the R+N minister to the B+K dragon bishop of shogi. What are decent rook-level pieces? DO they need to be short range, more "area-effect" pieces to keep them rook level?

Will the author of The Royal Chess (not to be confused with Royal Chess) please contact me here or at my email addres? Your post is hanging for a couple of reasons that can be corrected.

Since stalemate was sometimes a win for the stalemated side, and "bare king" is immediately obvious to everyone, I lean strongly toward the bare king rule winning out. Your argument, Kevin, cements my position.

Now, who's got stuff hanging? Contact me.

To Bill Nye. It is illegal to leave your king in check. When an illegal move is noticed, the rules require all subsequent moves to be retracted and re-done.

Piece values. Something I was always terrible at. Experience with Hype will let me argue some qualitative values. Pawns can move to 6 squares max, min 4, 7 - 6 on the initial move Rooks always move to 12. I'd argue rooks are worth roughly twice what pawns are. Bishops (B+W) are 18 max, 10 min, and 2 can mate, with king. Queens are 22 max, 16 min, and 2 can mate, with king. Or Q + B + K can mate. Rooks and knights don't have the proper footprint to force mate from anywhere on an open board. Knights, however, have a rather amazing mobility on a 4x4x4x4 board. The N has a min if 12 squares, and a max of 24 squares, and can deliver some nasty forks. I see it as clearly more valuable than a bishop, and while its minimum is less than the queen's, is maximum is greater. I'd put it closer to the queen than to the bishop in value, and it must certainly be considered a major piece despite not being able to force mate with a pair.

I like this idea. It's a natural extension of the easy version of 4D (said very tongue in cheek.) This does imply that with a little work the game is playable, and probably won't exhibit chaotic behavior, unplayability, generally through chaos, being the bane of many 4D efforts.

I'm guessing the knight will not be as relatively powerful in this as in H4 because the board is a bit tight for knight moves. But the knight is the only fully 4D piece in either game, so I think it gets a significant boost in power from that, compared to FIDE. Conversely, the bishops lose some power, I believe, since they are now restricted to 1/3 of the board, rather than 1/2. And yes, I know they aren't really restricted, but for each move, they hit proportionally less of the entire board.

Finally, the pawns. In H4 they are forward-sideways wazirs, which effectively makes them (very) minor pieces. I'm not familiar with Glinski's pawns, though I prefer them (and thus the board grain orientation) to other versions. The board orientation and pawn moves seem to cry out for Glinski's interpretation. But this means the pawns cannot get to the outside columns of big hexes without capture. And that means they can be (and are in some sense?) flanked without the pawns having any preventive recourse.

All in all, I like the idea, but suspect it could use playtesting to work out the rough edges. The designer in me wants to increase the size of at least the 3 central coulums of big hexes, and spread pieces as well as pawns across the backs of the 3 central big hexes. Or mess with the knight's move, making it 2 ortho moves and a diagonal out finish (or the diagonal part first, and then finish on the same hexes "from the other side".) Or even add a row of 5 big hexes across the middle of the board, and keep everything else the same. While 2 of the 3 increase the pawn distance, they might mitigate enough other things to be worth looking at.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170306091726.htm

My mother-in-law passed away 2 months ago, after a long series of major illnesses. She would have been 100 in a couple more weeks. My wife, her brother, and I have been her primary caretakers for years and this absorbed most of our time recently. I did not disappear from most of my activities by choice. Just kinda got too worn down to think. Interestingly, I still could and did comment on politics, which demonstrates again that politics is essentially emotional, not intellectual. But I played progressively lousier chess and finally lost most games by running out of time. Didn’t have the energy to work on design/development or rehab my shoulder. Until now.

Wife and I need some time to decompress. I just bought a kayak at Paddlefest, in Old Forge on  Saturday, and put it in the water Tuesday in Alexandrea Bay. My wife is looking for dog-friendly rentals in areas where we’d consider living. We’ve started thinking about our interests again. My wife is thinking about a boat and some waterfront. I’ve got a game or two to put together. And some fences to mend for disappearing. 

To V. Reinhart: I would be interested in the details of how you got your guard value.

Kevin Pacey, might I have your thoughts about the value of the king on a 144 square board. Is 1.77 a reasonable value for the king here? How does this contrast with the knight values on 64 and 144 square boards?

Thank you *so* much. I can't tell you how many posts I've lost over the years. Your change here makes this site much better!

Apparently the "kibbitz" line on this menu does not update. It shows the last kibbitz as 91 days ago, and there have been 2 more recent ones.

AlphaZero is a neural net which learns by playing against itself, starting with random moves and working up to a rating of over 3300, iirc. It runs on some very fancy hardware, so  its learning time is misleading. It played millions of games against itself to learn Go. I'm curious about just what it learns when it's teaching itself a game. How dependent is it on the exact board geometry and each player moving only one (or a few) pieces per turn? If the game is a very large (~1000 - 10,000 squares or more) massively multi-move abstract strategy war game with a board that can change between games, does that sort of thing make any significant difference, or merely add some time to the AI learning process?

Got this when I saved a test game preset:

Your settings have been saved as DoubleGOmove1. To access these settings for a game, use this URL:

• /play/pbm/play.php?game%3DDouble+GOmove%26settings%3DDoubleGOmove1

FAILED to REPLACE the row for this settings file in the GameSettings table. This may affect the information available about your settings file, and this failure should be reported to Fergus Duniho for correction. Tell him that the following line of SQL failed:

REPLACE INTO GameSettings(Game, Settings, Redirect, Author, Rules, Coded, Lastmod) VALUES ('Double GOmove', 'DoubleGOmove1', '', '', 'http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSgochess', 0, 1515093310)

A minor quibble here about board size: it can be considered a mutator. There are variants which propose placing an 8x8 standard chess set-up in the middle of a 10x10 or 12x12 board. This does change the game a fair bit. Now, with a 10x8, you can use it a few ways. You might have a file a rook can step to on either side of the standard 8x8 set-up, or you could 'play the long way' and set up with 6 rows of 8 squares empty between the 2 sides, or even move both sides up 1 square, so they ar the standard distance apart, but there is an extra row behind each side. Circular boards have long been used, also, for example. But what you are really doing here is examining how board geometry affects play and affects the utility of various pieces (eg: on a Byzantine circular board, bishops are nerfed and rooks are enhanced. In other words, you're playing Chess with Different Boards.

Thanks, Kevin. Man added to the piece descriptions. I've used a specific, systematic iconology to represent how the shatranj-style pieces I use move, which can be found in the chess variants wiki under Joe's strange notation. Once you know the symbols, you can tell exactly how the piece moves from the icon. Grin, it covers everything except the man.

The test game I'm currently playing is moving a little slow. The center is developing differently on both sides, but nothing is really happening on the 2 wings. I think this game really wants 3 moves per player-turn. The combination of short-range pieces and limited command areas plus not allowing any piece to move twice in a turn keeps the game from getting crazy, but does allow a much faster game and a different one, as ther is no great incentive to develop the wings in the beginning of the game that I can see. The restricted 3-move option should provide a decent and non-chaotic game.

Actually, I found that when I played competitively a few years ago, the more different games I played, the better I played in all of then, in general. This did not extend to games like Ultima or Latrunculi, but did apply to all the chesslike variants, as far as I can tell.

Is there a name for the WNH piece?

Stupid question: Could you rate wins as +2 and losses as -1, and would that help?

I couldn't get into the site for some hours this (Sunday) afternoon. I got blank pages repeatedly. I tried going into active games where I was to move, and got odd error messages and extremely truncated pages. Finally I was able to move in a game a while ago. When I tried again just now, the site came up fine. I use Mozilla Firefox.

Another game that no longer exists is

I don't know why they have code. I never use any code - I can't. Instead I erase all of it. I always make presets that are just dumb boards and pieces. When they were made, they worked. Whjen I look at what I put in, there's only this in the introduction box:

<p>This is a pair of experimental games featuring entirely shortrange pieces. There are two presets, ShortChess and Falcon King. ShortChess uses the standard FIDE king as the single royal piece with a Falcon "queen"; Falcon King has a pair of royal Falcons on each side.
</p>
<a href="/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DShortChess%26settings%3DfutC1">
  <h3>ShortChess
  </h3></a>
<a href="/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DFalcon+King+Chess%26settings%3DfutC2">
  <h3>Falcon King Chess
  </h3></a>

This is what you get when you try to get the presets:

Syntax Error on line 287

The function BIL has not been defined.        

287 for to fn join #piece L #from

"Myers-Briggs was, in its original essence, the work of a salty and extremely committed mother-in-law who needed to understand what the hell was going on with her daughter’s romantic choices."

https://www.theringer.com/2018/8/31/17800414/myers-briggs-personality-brokers-merve-emre-book

This topic has come up before on this site, so I thought this might be of interest.

Interesting video. The game in the video falls between our two games, Ben, in its approach to 4D. Personally, I think the 3D board is too gimmicky; I rarely like boards that don't display rotational or reflection symmetry. And I think that the 2D 'double grid' 4x4x4x4 board would make it easier easier to see moves in my version, but for yours, Ben, the 3D-style boards might just be better... what do you or anyone with experience think?

This is a very nice-playing modest variant. I've greatly enjoyed my games of it. I can absolutely recommend this game as an excellent variant tournament choice. It gets a lot of mileage out of a pair of fairly simple changes. The initial set-up is excellent; it gives good play. The weak piece is a very nice choice, and provides a nice companion/foil for the bishop and knight.

If you read what Christian Freeling has said about Grand Chess, you might buy the argument that Grand Chess is one of the most excellent modest variants. Late night ideas - am writing a reply about Hannibal Chess, and got sidetracked to a slight variant of Grand Chess which I will have to exorcise before I can go to sleep. (Sorry, Kevin, I'll finish your reply tomorrow. ;) In considering what Christian thinks about his design, I came back once again to the idea that the piece set is not complete until you use the 3 king + rook/bishop/knight pieces also. So Almost Grand replaces the queen with the centaur (N+K), the archbishop with the dragon bishop (B+K), and the chancellor with the dragon rook (R+K), and all else is as Grand. This army is a little weaker than Freeling's, mostly from losing the ability to leap over adjacent pieces. Clearly it works for all the Carrera-Capa variants, and might actually help those games a little by toning down the power of the queen equivalents plus losing the archbishop's ability to checkmate without the aid of any other piece. I admit that after playing Grand Chess, playing Carrera-Capa made me feel claustrophobic!

Now this is such an obvious idea someone must have done it before. Can anyone point me to such a game?

Thank you, Kevin, and Ben is right, I do occasionally push the boundaries of chess a bit more than most, and also the definitions. To me, Hannibal is about the minimum acceptable change for a game. It adds a simple shortrange piece and changes the board minimally, just enough to fit the colorbound pair. The idea is minimal, the play is excellent. I meant it about this being a decent tourney game. It's straight-up hardnosed chess, no gimmicks.



This completed game from Game Courier has errored out. Can it be recovered? Thanks, Joe

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Janus%20Chess&log=joejoyce-david_64-2008-52-143