Comments by joejoyce

Hi, Kevin. Extreme concentration can be very useful in game design, but it's not so useful when running night operations, especially when you're running an entire shift. It's constant interruptions, which destroyed my ability to do serious, CYA paperwork... yeah, I worked in a bureaucracy. So now I can get interrupted, but have found another odd ability useful for game design. I do a lot of the design work subconsciously.

My 4D variant was something I worked on for years since school, and never managed a satisfactory result. I went through all sorts of pieces, used ridiculous numbers of pawns, once looking at 2 rows of 16 pawns. One day, after decades, I suddenly "saw" - like I was looking at it right there in front of me - the game pieces set up for a game. That told me what pieces were needed, and where they and the pawns were set up. The image was beautiful and perfect... just not quite complete. I got all this with no rules. They took me a fair amount of time and some help to get, but I got a good result in everything except the number of people who play it.

The next 2 games I saw set up and ready to play, right next to each other, were Great and Grand Shatranj. They came with rules, though, so my subconscious learned! However, what I consider clearly my best chess variant, the Battle of Macysburg, was the result of extreme concentration carried out over a few years of time. I could "feel" a good wargame in Chieftain Chess, but it was not close or obvious how to get there. I literally iterated my way through dozens of games to get from Chieftain to Macysburg, with the invaluable aid of my developer. Try to get a good playtest partner to work with. Mine helped me turn chess back into a wargame.

And finally, for a very odd "superpower", I could hear ultrasonic noises at about 40k Hz, which meant I could hear some ultrasonic traffic signal controls, and also some store security systems. There was 1 store I could not enter because the screeching was painfully loud to me. Another, not quite as bad, I followed along the sonic beam right to an emitter hidden behind a rack of clothes. I moved the clothes to make sure, and saw it actually sticking out from the wall. Thankfully I have either aged out of that ability or everyone is using infrared or something else instead of ultrasonics!

Hi, Bob. To the best of my knowledge, the NDW was first used in the games Great and Grand Shatranj, and called the Minister. Its companion piece is the High Priestess, NAF. Both George Duke and I looked for previous usage or mention, and found nothing. They are great pieces, fun to play with, and in close quarters, devastating. Enjoy them. I have.

If anyone can find any earlier usage or mention of those pieces under whatever name, please let me know.

https://www.chessvariants.org/invention/two-large-shatranj-variants

Hi, Bob. Thank you for mentioning the High Priestess, which apparently was the first use of the FAN on this site - I looked but could not find an earlier usage. I have an odd request. You prefer High Priest as the piece name, and I prefer High Priestess, because I feel women players and designers get short shrift in chess. The oval in an opened circle is a nice icon, but it can be used 2 ways, the orientation you show here, or upside down. Would you be willing to use the upside down version to specifically designate the high priestess, and the right-side up orientation be used to designate the high priest?

Thank you for adding the diagram that plays the 1 move version. I sincerely appreciate that! I think it's clear that adding an active diagram to the variants onsite does increase the number of plays the games get. You are giving the site more ways to be used and enjoyed. Excellent!

I'm trying to figure out how to ask if there is any way the diagrams can be adapted to multi-move variants without seeming ungrateful. I'm fairly confident it can be done, because Fergus did an excellent job automating Chieftain Chess! The point may well be moot. How many people actually make and/or play multi-move variants? Let's see, there's me ... is there anyone else who does multi-movers?

One original purpose of this series of variants was to make blatantly obvious the differences between single move/player-turn and true (ie: playable and non-gimmicky) multi-move/player-turn chesses. One quickly sees the flow of play is totally different because the flow of pieces changes. Yes, the rules set it up that way, but it is expected that players will funnel pieces from the edges to the center anyway, because the king is there, and it may get 2 moves/turn. So the king would generally be the only or primary target anyway.

If that's too over the top for some, ignore the 2 wings and just do 2 moves in the center, either any 2 pieces, or 1 piece and 1 pawn move. The 2 guard/mann units per side may count as either or both. Even that will show divergence from 1 piece/turn moves. This is a stable 3 moves/player-turn variant, and I believe it should be a stable 4-move variant.

Finally, thanks to Kevin Pacey for playtesting.

Diamond Morph Board Mutator

Take a 10x10 chessboard, and allow movement both on the 100 squares/cells of the board and on the corners of the squares, that is, on all the intersections of vertical and horizontal lines making up the 11x11 grid that defines the 10x10 board. This gives 221 board positions, and the unit cell is a centered square lattice. The board can be considered to be 2 interlocking 2D square patterns with the corners of the squares of 1 pattern marking the center of the squares of the other pattern. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-centered-square-lattice-structure-Between-each-full-circles-the-bond-represents-a_fig3_49907947 This board has some unusual properties. 

If you try to maintain the standard moves of the chesspieces on this board, the first thing you notice is that it's the rooks that are bound to roughly half the board. A rook that starts the game in a cell can only move from cell to cell, and never on the lattice, and the rook that starts on a lattice intersection can never move into a cell, because only diagonal moves allow you to go between cells and lattice intersections. And that means the bishops are not bound to only part of the playing surface. It's a rook - bishop reversal of roles. 

The wazir’s orthogonal moves on this board are simple and obvious: you step from 1 cell to an adjacent cell through the common side of the 2 cells, or you step from 1 intersection to an orthogonally adjacent intersection, moving along the grid line. But the diagonal moves are not quite so simple. One diagonal step takes you from cell to intersection or intersection to cell. It takes a diagonal move of 2 steps to bring a piece from cell to cell or intersection to intersection. So how does a ferz move? Does it always step 1 and so change between cells and intersections with each move? Or does it always step 2, thus re-binding itself to either cells or intersections? I will argue that the player should have the choice for a ferz of taking 1 or 2 steps for each move, and the same for any piece that has a diagonal move, like the knight.  It’s certainly not necessary, but I feel that if you use this board you should consider using the expanded diagonal move: 2 diagonal steps to bring the piece back to the same subset of locations, cells or intersections, *and* the 1 step which changes the subset of locations the piece ends on. The board is more than double the size of a “standard” 10x10 board (221 playable locations vs. 100) so allow the extra moves a ferz would get with 1 and 2 step options. 

This applies to the knight, which can be considered to move either 1 step orthogonally and then 1 or 2 steps diagonally, doubling its movement power, or diagonally then orthogonally, although you might make it a slider then, rather than a leaper. I lean against allowing the knight to move 1 step diagonally, 1 step orthogonally, and then a second step diagonally, as this can be considered violating the spirit of the knight’s move. (Or not!)

One feature of this board is that it takes exactly the same number of steps to go from 1 location to another either orthogonally or diagonally or any combination of the two. On a standard 2D checkered board, that is very much not true. What it all means is that I’m playing with the underlying geometry of the board. The board locations are all “actually” diamonds, and the “rooks” actually go through the corners of those diamonds, thus becoming ‘bishops.’ And on that underlying diamond board, the “bishops” go through the sides of the diamonds, thus becoming ‘rooks’ despite the way it looks like they move on the game board. To visualize the ‘actual’ board, take a unit cell, mark the midpoints of each side, then draw straight lines from the top and bottom points to the 2 side points. Do that for every cell, and you get a diamond pattern. Each unit cell of the game board contains 2 diamonds, a complete 1 in the center of the cell, and the other is quartered and stuck in the corners. 

If I knew how to actually make this board in Game Courier I would, but – for those who have seen any of the Jumanji movies, my weakness is modern tech :\ - I do have an experimental game for the board I’ve described. There are 21 pawns and 21 pieces per side in the game. They are set up in 4 rows (“ranks”) along opposite edges of the board, which I do not think should be checkered in the standard way, but rather the way Fergus made the newish Shatranj board, a basic marbled white board with 2x2 squares of light green laid over the center 4 squares of the board, with the pattern shifted 4 squares orthogonally and repeated, in every direction. For a 10x10 board, this would give 9 2x2 green squares, 4 in the corners and the remaining 5 in a “+” shape spaced evenly between the corners. Anyway, here’s the setup, legend at bottom:

  P	P     P	    P	  P	P     P	    P	  P     P
P    P	   P	 P     P     P	   P	 P     P     P     P	      
  R	H     N     B	  G	G     B     N	  H	R 
R    H	  HP	 S   DWAF    K	 DWAF    S     HP    H	   R

P = pawn	G = guard(mann)
R = rook	HP = high priestess
H = hero	S = shaman
N = knight	DWAF = pasha
B = bishop

Bob, since you asked, here are a few more games, most mine, but starting with David Jagger's excellent PiRaTeKnIcS:

https://www.chessvariants.com/44.dir/pirateknics.html

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/taxi-the-nuclear-cab-chess-game

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/gochess

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/chesimals-autonomous-multi-unit-pieces

My argument isn't about shortening the total number of individual unit moves, but rather about giving all the pieces more opportunities for movement and involvement in the game. Just for starters, every opening pawn move is matched with a piece move. Right there, you get all the turns that are just opening pawn moves to move a piece, also. That gives you a few extra moves right in the beginning of the game. I believe that will force both players to use more of their pieces in a game. And that is doubly true if you allow any 2 pieces to move per player-turn. I do agree that each turn will be longer, and the game overall might go on longer, but that was not part of my considerations. And for what it's worth, it's a lot better than the only other option for "forcing" more use of all the pieces that comes to mind now, which is to just remove the pawns and play without them, which is in some ways very instructive, but does not give you anything close to a game of skill.

Hi, Bob. I've got 1 more entry into this concept of chess pieces as parts, https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/fluid-chess. I'd leave your Blender version in place. It's actually fairly common for chess variants to more-or-less duplicate other and earlier versions. If someone offers a variant with a significant difference, I see no reason to reject it.

It's nice to see that short range pieces are still capable of interesting designers. Welcome to the ShortRange Project, Petar!

The general tendency for chess variantists (and wargamers) is to make games with pieces that are as powerful or more powerful than the games they are playing. Few of us start out thinking "Gee, wouldn't it be a great idea to make weaker pieces!" And I didn't. I was making stronger pieces, but starting from shatranj. Amping up the ferz and alfil isn't very hard, especially considering the ferz is sitting between the king and the alfil at the start of a shatranj game. The game is telling you what to do to fix it, or at least giving very strong hints.

What pushed me to actually write up Modern Shatranj was a kibbitzer's comment on a shatranj game I was playing. I was complaining about how useless so many shatranj pieces are, and how easy it would be to fix them, and got a kibbitz comment that if I had promotion rules and wrote it up, I'd have a publishable variant. So I did...

Might I ask what led you to create short leaper chess?

I received the following email:

"I just wanted to bring to your attention an error on the Ultima variant page: Ultima (chessvariants.com)

In the "Object of the game" section, the word "checkmating" should be changed to "capturing" (so the line says "capturing or stalemating"). This variant is intended to be played without checkmating; you are meant to capture the enemy king. This is an important aspect of the game, because a common strategy is to misdirect the opponent into opening their king up to an attack in order to capture their king on the next move. The threat of losing to a "sneak attack" was specifically mentioned by Robert Abbott when he published the rules.

For citations: Ultima was first published in Robert Abbott's book "Abbott's New Card Games" in 1963. On page 125, when detailing the rules of Ultima, Abbott wrote "The object of the game is to capture the enemy king."

This webpage was written by Robert Abbott 41 years later, in 2004: http://www.logicmazes.com/games/puz1to4.html He writes: "In Ultima the object is to capture the king, not achieve check mate." This is what the page said when it was published by Abbott in 2004, and it has remained unchanged since.

I hope this information helps. Thank you for your time."

A quick check of the references shows the above is correct. I started a more extensive search, but haven't found anything else yet, except the discrepancy noted below. Currently I've started looking through the 150 comments on the game's onsite page. If I find anything other in the search, I'll post it here.

Abbott himself recommended the chessvariants page for the best explanation of the game. From Abbott's logicmazes.com page:

"After my card game book was published, I began seeing problems with Ultima and tried to fix one of them by making a change in the rules. These revised rules appeared in the 1968 paperback edition of the book. The change turned out to be a pretty bad idea, and everyone uses the 1963 rules instead.

For the best explanation of the rules (the 1963 version) see this page of the web site ChessVariants.org. Not only is their explanation well-written, but if you click on “Animated Illustration” you’ll see a series of moving diagrams that help explain the pieces (a sample is at the right). These are animated GIFs created by David Howe. They are a fantastic innovation for presenting game rules and could be used in other forms of technical writing. The Chess Variants site also has an interview with me."

I would like to ask one or more of the editors to look over David Paulowich's Opulent Lemurian Shatranj for consideration as a featured variant. For obvious reasons, I cannot suggest it, but the way the game is constructed with pairs of opposing pieces of different values gives this game a quality that most games don't have, including at least most of mine. I can be accused of being prejudiced, so if no one likes this game of David's, then please consider other of his games.

Would it break the game to allow 2 moves/player after white's initial turn 1 single move?

This past weekend I was up in Boston with the family to celebrate 2 birthdays. Saturday our grandson was 1 year old, and Monday I was 75. And while I don't want my name removed from the editors' list, it's more than time to put "retired" next to it. I haven't been an active editor for some time now. And I don't program. All the other editors do. I originally volunteered not because I thought I was qualified but because no one else had volunteered and somebody had to do it or watch the site fade. I'm very happy to see it hasn't faded.

Being a member of this site has been a lot of fun, and while being an editor has been a lot of work, I learned a lot about game design during the time. I continue to design, but have expanded my areas of interest. Still, every time I think I'm done with chess variants, something drags me back. Maybe one of these times, I'll get chesimals right.

I've met a lot of good designers, made a fair number of friends and acquaintances, and stepped on a few toes. For the damaged digits, I apologize. For all the others, thank you. I cannot begin to mention names, because there are so many people it would be daylight in New York before I finished. And no matter how hard I tried, I'd leave out a few. It's been a fascinating time. I've met an amazing range of interesting people, in all senses of the word. I feel quite fortunate.

Hi, Greg! Thanks again for putting some of my games in ChessV. I deeply appreciate it. Gilded Grand Shatranj was a spur of the moment design, over the course of some minutes, quite literally exactly as it appears on the Grand Shatranj rules page, and almost that fast. That's the only write-up of it that I recall. If I actually wrote up all the games I've done while here as separate game pages, I'd show twice as many as appear here, or more. Many of the games are part of a series or variants of a particular game and/or style. Truthfully, many of my games are designed to illustrate the ideas as simply and easily and most familiarly as possible.

Hi, David! Glad to see you back! This is a nice helpmate and looks like an interesting 'little' game to play - all that power in the corners and a weak center, on a small board! The central rook is a rare feature, or was, a decade or two ago. Who's used it besides Ralph, you, and me, any idea? I don't remember it in even any semi-popular game onsite aside from what you and Ralph have done.

I'm playing 2 games with Kevin Pacey, and I accessed one of them, but I have the same problem with the other Kevin did in his games with Carlos, I only see a little box in the upper left of the screen that says Black and underneath that, Kevin Pacey. Hope this game can be retrieved as it's the one I'm not losing in!

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Modern+Shatranj&log=panther-joejoyce-2022-123-929&userid=joejoyce

While I'm pretty inactive these days, I do play the occasional game, and when I check for moves, I check what's new. First, thank you Kevin for pointing out names I've already used for pieces.

For your tentative 'high priestess', I think "grande prêtresse" is possibly a good choice.

Similarly, for 'hero' I think "héros" with both the accent and ending "s" is a decent choice.

The accents in the names mark them as non-English, and the spellings maintain the separation of your and my pieces without really changing the names you wished. I admit that I am naming deficient and no one except me may actually like the alternates, so feel free to ignore or delete this post.

Are any of the ideas here: http://chessvariants.wikidot.com/joe-s-strange-notation of any value to extended Betza notation or piece icon design, or are they too divergent? My iconology attempt was to define the move of the piece with the icon without using actual footprints or numbers, and I haven't seen any other attempts to do so, although I haven't been very active recently.

Belated thanks, HG, for the playable interactive diagram. I appreciate it and it may actually get a few more games of Lemurian played. I still greatly prefer David Paulowich's Opulent Lemurian. When I started designing new shatranj pieces I decided to stick very closely to standard chess formats because the pieces were so very different I felt I couldn't get fancy with the set-ups or the games would never get played. That the FIDE (Modern Shatranj) and Carrera/Capablanca (Great Shatranj) variants actually do get played seems to indicate I was at least partially right. And I would be remiss if I did not thank Christine Bagley-Jones here, because she designed several games right along with me, did her own designs, and put them in Zillions of Games, which got more played. And it was a blast collaborating with her! Collaborations are rare in any sort of artistic design and that collaboration was seamless!

Semi-Simultaneous Step Chess

This is a mutator. It should work across a broad range of variants.

Movement

Players make 1 standard move per turn. However, the pieces only make the smallest step possible each turn but turn after turn, each piece continues making the smallest step possible until it reaches its destination, where it stops and is once again available for movement. Sliders move 1 square/turn. Leapers make 1 leap/turn, so a knight gets to its destination in 1 turn, but a knight rider will advance only 1 knight’s leap/turn until it gets to its destination.

Who Moves First?

At the end of each player turn, each currently-stepping piece is moved in the same time order in which the moves were originally made. An alternate possibility is at the end of each player-turn, only that player’s pieces move, in time order. This change affects captures, see below.

Capture

During the stepping of the pieces, when a piece lands on another piece, the piece landed on is considered stepped on – it is captured and removed from the game immediately. Clearly the question of whether white and black interleave all their current steps, or if each side does all its own steps only, after its current move, has a huge effect on the game.

Discussion

Yes, the rules allow for players to capture their own pieces. And the rules allow players to see things coming and move out of the way just before the attacks will strike their pieces. And they can schedule an attack on the square just after the opponent piece gets there.

So why do any distance moves? Well, the more distance moves you do, the more pieces you can have moving at the same time. So the more attacks you can make in any given turn. You can try “time on target” attacks where you launch attacks over the course of several turns that all land in the same area at or near the same turn.

And that brings up another point. Why not have indeterminate moves? A slider may keep going in the same direction turn after turn until it captures a piece, hits the edge of the board, or is ordered to stop. It is given only a direction in which to move, not a destination.

Comments welcome.

Actually, I agree with the idea that one page more or less per person makes a noticeable difference. I meant literally 1 page, kept for the specific comments and discussion, done by the few people who do wind up with a separate revised version. And it's kept for the discussion.

It's a personal thing with me. I hate seeing information lost. I argued with everyone from John Smith to Derek Nalls about deleting games. I lost both those particular arguments, and lament it. Both had interesting stuff that they later decided didn't live up to their standards.

But I admit to being surprised at how many game courier settings files I have. Some of them can go, being early attempts at something I did better or gave up on. Some are non-chess prototype designs used for playtests of other people's games. Game Courier can handle a lot of abstracts besides chess variants. Should they go, too?

This game has been anticipated. David Paulowich posted this in 1997: https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/newchan.html

This place needs a historian. Where is George Duke when you need him? Or Jeremy Good?

HG, I initially thought the Shooters were too strong. Dropping the Shooters' queen analog to a DWAF should do much to reduce the Shooters' total value.

Question: Are you giving the Shooters' pawns an initial double step? If so, try taking that away for the Shooters and see what that does. That alone might cause a big reduction in Shooter overall value.

Fwiw, the symbology of the pieces 'describes' how they move, and it's at least internally consistent.

HG, Christine, Greg, Fergus, I can't thank you enough. You all have made me and a lot of other people look good. It's a privilege to be associated with you.

I'm seeing the sort of activity this site needs. There are new people playing, and there is new software for playing that even dinosaurs like me can not only appreciate but use. This site needs both. There are a lot of people making variants online. One place is the ChessCraft Discord, where Stuart, the programmer, has created a very active design space for people who like creating chess variants. I found the site by accident, searching for shatranj variants. A member there credited a shatranj design of mine for inspiration, so I joined that discord to see what was there. It's an active site, and there have to be others around. If anyone knows about any such sites, I'd like to hear about them, although they should get their own comment thread, maybe just "Other Chess Variant SItes". It might be worthwhile to poll our members about other sites, and if not partner with some, at least we should share each others information.

Thank you, Christine, for all the work you've done on these games.

Thank you, Greg!

Very nice work, Christine, on the update!

Hey, Christine. The original piece set had the "+" on the wazir, but not the "x" on the high priestess. You did the H.P. icon with the "x", and I believe I at one time substituted that into the piece set, but if so, it fell out again. I have no idea whatsoever how the wazir lost its "+". All I can figure is someone went into the GtS piece set and changed that piece. I did not!

Good grief! I walked right into that, didn't I! Thanks for the information. The short video was informative.

Any more comments or suggestions?

There is a free seminar online on the origins of chess tomorrow, Friday, February 19th from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. eastern standard time (GMT -5)

https://www.facebook.com/events/2791172177802041

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/opening-moves-the-extraordinary-origins-of-chess-tickets-129749394933

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/11/191126140413.htm

Thank you. I appreciate it



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.

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?

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.

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?

"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.

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

Another game that no longer exists is

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.

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

Thanks, Greg! Grin, kind of embarrassing when you've played the game... Gryphon is certainly a better name than knight cannon or knight catapult, which I was considering. George, thanks for reminding me about the names trebuchet and catapult. Clearly I remembered them unconsciously, It was bugging me. It is such a nice piece someone should have used it somewhere, but that is true of many pieces. And it does fit very nicely in The ShortRange Project, George, filling one of the many holes in the piece lists. Note it hits 16 squares, with a max range of 3, falling neatly between pieces like the FAN, WDN, DWAF hitting 16 squares with a max range of 2 and the AF+AF and DW+DW pieces, hitting 16 squares with a max range of 4. Or conversely, between the A+F and D+W, range 3, footprint 12, and the A+/-F and D+/-W, range 3, footprint 20.

Where does thre Gryphon rank in power in the above group of pieces?

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.

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.

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.

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)

"Aurelian Florea wrote on 2017-12-15 EST

@Vickalan

I will make sure that machine learning does invade the chess variants world. :)!"

Good! Make me an opponent for Macysburg and its bigger (and smaller) relatives. ;) I need a good opponent to learn from.

"V. Reinhart wrote on 2017-12-15 EST

I think it's pretty much hopeless for anyone to argue that humans can win against computers in any type of game. Our only chance of winning a game is to play it before it gets studied by computers. So people like @Aurelian and @JoeJoyce will need to stay busy inventing new games faster then people like @GregStrong and @HGMuller can program this stuff!!"

I actually agree that AI on good hardware will generally outperform humans, eventually. And for games, I suspect the AI will start with something very like AlphaZero as described by HG Muller below. If not, it will be something better.

I do think, however, people grossly underestimate the size of the game space AZ must evaluate each turn for a more complex abstract, or just how much the possibilities expand with each additional ply investigated. The ‘best moves’ often depend on enemy intentions and *exactly* where each piece winds up in 2 – 3 turns, and may depend on which order you move your 50 or 100 or 250… pieces each turn.

"H. G. Muller wrote on 2017-12-15 EST

Note that AlphaZero is not just a neural network. It is a tree search guided by a NN, the NN being also used for evaluation in the leaf nodes. The tactical abilities are mainly dependent on the search. The NN is just good at deciding which positions require further search to resolve the tactics."

The key to how well the AI does on commercially available machines in a few years (under reasonable assumptions) depends heavily on just how good the neural net is “at deciding which positions require further search to resolve the tactics,” I believe. That may be enough of a handicap for humans for a little while.

“Aurelian Florea wrote on 2017-12-16 EST

Actually I'm more in it for the mathematics of chess variants…”

Grin, that comment may have been a mistake! I would truly like to understand just why the Command and Maneuver games I’ve designed work as well as they do. In considering the introductory scenario A Tale of Two Countries: Intro, the first thing I noticed was that there are an amazing number of essentially equivalent moves available each turn, of which the player can only make 8. Which 8? It’s a small game, 12 x 24, with only 36 pieces/side at start, and while there are replacements and reinforcements arriving during the game, 36 units is probably the largest size either army will ever be.

I totally accept for the sake of argument that the AI will be a tactical genius in Tale, but I question the strategic elements because it seems to me that future game states are indeterminate, because while the AI may/will make the best tac moves this turn, the human probably won’t. So how does the AI ‘guess’ the game state in 2 or 3 turns, say 3 – 6 plys (player turns) deep?

In Macysburg, the situation is probably worse, at 32 x 32 and 84 pieces/side, all able to move each turn, arriving in 4 even-sized groups around the edge of the board over 20 turns, with ‘rally” allowing 1/3rd of the captured pieces to be returned to the board.  

The pieces dance back and forth seeking advantage. Where a piece is on the next turn is often difficult to determine. And ‘combat,’ standard chess capture, is totally dependent on the exact locations of every piece. While you can figure out/guess some of what your opponent might do in reply to your current moves, you really can’t do predictions accurate enough to put your pieces in motion for a couple turns and expect to have them all positioned right to demolish the enemy without taking equal losses.

For humans, there’s a very strong indeterminacy that provides the necessary ‘fog of war’ in the game. Why would the AI do so much better at penetrating that indeterminacy?

When I considered the paths - world lines - of the pieces in Tale, I saw that they were chaotic in the same sorts of ways that mathematical chaos is explained for the non-mathematical mind. Some strategically or tactically located pieces of terrain act as strange attractors, pulling in pieces from all over the board. Pieces that start off next to each other may all follow the same general (parallel) world line or split apart to end up almost anywhere on the board. And starting with the same board configuration, you may get some similar world lines from game to game, or wildly divergent ones.

Agreed, just in this description, I’ve given handles with which to attack the problem, and good statistics helps - a lot, I’d imagine. But isn’t there some sort of limit to how accurate a projection an AI could make? If AIs could truly predict the future, there’d be an awful lot of very rich programmers, no? ;) Doesn’t the strong presence of chaos wash away the ability to predict accurately? And isn’t that the AIs best weapon?

Finally, just for the record, the games I’m describing I’ve designed only because I wanted to play them, not to defeat computer players. I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of a  genuine, workable fusion of chess and war games, and for humans at least, these games work well, according to the people who managed to play them with me (some discussion on boardgamegeek.)

Thank you. Great to see the site getting updated!

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!

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 Kevin, Greg, for the condolences

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

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.

Hey, Kevin, we're saying the same thing about the N move, although I said it rather clumsily, an occupational hazard when I'm very short on sleep. Let me phrase it this way:

The board is too small if the knight cannot make a complete tour on any and every individual 2D board section presented in the game without ever leaving that 2D section until the tour is complete.

Heh, saying the N could make the tour 'comfortably' was probably not as precise as I would have liked. But however you cut it, I think your minimum 2D level size is not 19 but 37, giving 1369 locations. The only game software I know that would handle that size is Vassal. But it should handle it very easily.

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.

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.

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.

Good question, Kevin, and as far as I can see or find (so far), the answer is undetermined. There was little standardization of stalemate rules until a couple hundred years ago. Different areas did different things, and I suspect that in the situation diagrammed, all 3 possible outcomes were, at some place and time, accepted.

With rook-level pieces, in the spirit of shatranj, I find the knightrider stylistically wrong. Of course, I find the NN an awkward piece, and I am terrible with awkward pieces. To me, ches should be fighting with your opponent, not fighting with your own pieces. That being said, the NN is a limited piece, far more in keeping with the limited pieces of ancient chess than the modern versions of strong pieces. I see it as a sort of limited missile, able to strike across the board, but with restricted targeting. It seems like a piece for a very large board with lots of pieces worth a range of values.

At this point, the hero ands shaman pieces (D+W) & (A+F), or the bent versions (D+/-W) & (A+/-F), while more powerful, or possibly the Oliphaunt (AF+AF) or Lightningwarmachine (DW+DW) seem to me to be the best fits, being very roughly worth around 5 or so pawns and short ranged. Pieces like the half duck (HFD) or scout or other such pieces seem more awkward, to me. ... Hm, I guess there's a giant shatranj variant lurking somewhere in my head.

Fergus, I'm just doing it manually through each person's ID page. So far, once I've changed a password, the user has no more problem logging in.

Happy New Year (and Hanukkah)!

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?

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.

Aurelian Florea wrote on 2016-09-11 None

If you don't mind modern shatranj is an inspiration allong with shatraj kamil for my own 15x10 I shall complete and publish in a few months or so, actually I'm thinking on the name great modern shatranj. Are you ok with that, Joe?

Full circle! A decade ago, I emailed Christian Freeling 2 game write-ups, asking if I could use the name "Grand Shatranj" and copy his setup, as his variant Grand Chess had inspired me to create 2 games where I'd only seen one muddled game before. He was very courteous and friendly, and thus Great and Grand Shatranj were posted together here, direct outgrowths of Modern Shatranj. Grin, so if Christian Freeling approves of your game, I'd be happy to have it named great modern shatranj. ;)

Seriously, thank you for the compliment. I certainly have no objections to your use of the name with the caveats that your game should bear some resemblance to mine and further not be significantly offensive to the social mores. Without actually seeing what you're going to post first, that's about as close as I can come to saying I'd be honored. It's always nice to hear that someone appreciates your efforts. And I wish you the best in yours.

I see a game design that's intended to be played as a collaboration between the designer and the player(s). I've been lucky enough to see a couple of my games become what passes for moderately popular on this site. That people modify the games to suit themselves is a good sign, in my opinion, that the games have some merit. But the games I post here are public property. Anybody may do whatever they want with them. So I truly appreciate, in more than one way, that you asked. Take your ideas and run with them. Enjoy!

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.

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? ;)

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. ;)