Comments by nelk114

As it stands now, no single piece is capable of delivering checkmate with the help of its own King.

This note seems to refer to the 'original'.

On an individual‐piece basis this applies here too; it takes at least three (perhaps even four) pieces (including the king) to deliver, let alone force, checkmate.

This should be less of a concern here though: the Conquer rule means that the total material stays the same, so there are no issues with both sides forcing a lack of sufficient mating material or suchlike (and the Knights give — albeit limited — control over the binding of captured pieces).

if only the AI plays, the variant always leads to checkmate or one side resigns

I think this is the first game I've seen where the Interactive Diagram does anything besides draw by repetition! Hardly a proof of winnability, but at least reasonably persuasive.

Since the statement of the rules seems to me clear, I've now published this

Would it be worth someone adding an explanation of planar moves to this page? As it stands it certainly is a particularly blatant relic of a time when editorial standards here were somewhat(!) laxer.

your email address leads me to think it is not real

It is in fact real, albeit a play on an earlier practice of providing false email addresses before websites started to insist on verifying them. So should you still wish to send me those I can receive them there. Or if you prefer a realer‐looking one, perhaps [my username]@disroot.org (which tbf is also less of a pain for me to access over tor). Though I agree I have scant programming experience and yet scanter web‐design experience, so at least at this point I don't feel too strongly either way.

Getting a newer nicer set of email addresses (associated with mỹ own domain) remains on the to‐do list.

There's so much confusion surrounding the names for [Gryphon and Rhino] that I'm on the verge of just calling them Merv and Fred. (I'm not entirely kidding.)

And all that because Murray mistook the latter's move description and doomed it to periodic reinvention… Could be worse; they could have as many different names as the RN and BN

De facto this proposal to name the W-then-B a Manticore […] turned out to be a bust; everyone using that piece seems to use a Rhino to represent it. […] Better switch to calling it Rhino…

Whilst as Fergus notes this is not quite true, I would be very tempted to redress the Piececlopedia page to have Rhino as the main name if and when I get around to updating it (I have a file of notes sitting around but have yet to actually do the redraft). The issue I originally noted of the name clash with (another existing page)[/piececlopedia.dir/rhino.html] persists, but it would hardly be unique in that respect.

Though oddly enough, even Rhino as a name seems to only have really taken off after Manticore had established a (however small) presence. It's almost a shame I only read Meta‐Chess after writing that page; JWB calls it a ‘Hydra’, which would have been arguably near‐ideal

And as for graphical representations, I remain partial to Alfaerie's four‐bishops icon used e.g. in the Piececlopedia page: suggestive and devoid of naming controversy :‌)

Aardvark

A nice choice :‌)

the "Overtaker R" on that list is the Chariot (attributed to QuangTrung).

That might be a reference that's possible to track down, though Quang Trung does have a rather large set of ‘editions’ with differences even among identically‐named pieces iirc. Perhaps one to look back up one of these days

Strictly speaking, Mojibake refers not to an encoding but to the effect of a mismatch between (writer's and reader's) encodings.

What had happened to this page, as well as many others (incl. several of Gilman's, f.ex.) is the same that had happened to this page (cf. the comments); it should be fixable by the same means: converting from UTF-8 to Windows-1252.

Also yes, the leftmost number in the Finch diagram should definitely be a 3

In existing games such as Tai Shogi or Maka Dai Dai Shogi, these peices are placed on the respective edges. I tend to disagree with this, since it basically cripples the forward diagonal moves.

The counterargument

Asymmetrical pieces deserve rather more exposure imo :‌)

A quick test w/ the ID suggests ꝥ the lovers are the (absolute) royalty

That's… oddly disconcerting, at least at first. But very cool

Re

Do you take notes on these things, or something? :D

I'm actually a really atrocious note‐taker — never learned to do it and never found much need; I have a good memory and that's easier to look up that written notes. That plus the search engine(s), having been here 10+ years at this point iirc (active for nearly 10), and in Gilman's case the fact that for all its density his stuff's actually pretty well organised once you get the hang of it, is quite plenty to build up a bit of context

Ofc the cute ‘Infanta de Castille’ pun does actually make that an unusually mnemonic name for the RA, even by Gilman standards; I always found ‘Inquisitor’ the harder one to remember

This is a really rather pleasant‐looking piece mix :‌) And an unusually ungimmicky (promotions aside — though in their way elegant too, particularly in the little detail that a promoted pawn needs at least two more moves to promote further) use of the Frog

Unfortunately, only three Frogs per game can promote to Tsarevnas

This is an additional rule? It's probably just me but the way it's positioned in the article makes it seems as if it should be derivable from the other rules…

In any case, I take it that means that a frog that reaches the far rank while there's already a Tsarevna on the board (or there have already been 3) simply remains as it is?

@Bob:

Peter Aronson almost went there, but decided to add the fD move too; as it stands the ‘Silverfearful’ appears only in a couple of obscure Gilman Shōgi variants as a promotee

@J‐L:

I didn't get the idiom either when I first encountered it in Aronson's write‐up (linked above), and haven't seen it anywhere else in the wild; apparently it goes back to Southeast‐Asian cultures, where white elephants were considered sacred, but receiving one could therefore ruin you as you had to maintain it but couldn't e.g. put it to work

How does the promoted princess move?

Is the knight component of the empress western‐ or chinese‐style?

Does the river have any effect other than enhancing pawns upon crossing?

As Bob notes, Badger exists but apparently only on the obscure end of piece names: Taikyoku has at least one kind, as does Man and Beast 20. Ofc since Taikyoku is in any case loose with its naming and Gilman's Badger is Hex‐prism‐exclusive so no problem there, and it's nicely mnemonic.

Likewise, Ram has some prior use, not only as the Advancer but also in a couple places as the Siege device, as well as in H.G.'s Megalomachy; since these are typically square‐board pieces it's perhaps a little more contentious.

Rat seems pretty much unused, if perhaps an odd animal to associate with rooklike moves

Why not Infanta and Inquisitor for RA/BD? The latter is alas subject to a collision with Bob's name for another piece (which might suggest retaining Bede; it's not great, being a name, but it's at least suggestive) with a superset of its move, but Infanta is otherwise unused.

Gilman suggests (in Diverging Further iirc) Dragoon for Derzhanski's Drake

@Bob: Begum at least is a preëxisting term, though distinguishing it from other aristocratic titles could ofc be tricky

EDIT: I didn't see this thread had been continued elsewhere

The authentic arabic plural of dabbāba is apparently dabbābāt. But English doesn't usually bother preserving Arabic plurals so Dabbabas is perfectly fine and will be more widely understood

This was in fact the basis of an earlier Gilman name for the Newt/Astra: since it was in the centre of the Rose's circle, he called it a Rosette (and correspondingly he had names for the centres of other oblique roses).

Fwiw he calls the q[FD] (not valid XBetza, but valid original Betza as per one of the Really Big Board pages) a (curved) Alpaca.

To every second space (read more attentively)

‘Every other space’ means the same thing in English

There’re many hippogonal movers, pieces that ride orthogonally or diagonally; what if there’ll be pieces who ride hexagonally?

It's certainly an interesting way of describing the Hexmaster (previously described by Gilman as the admittedly uninspiringly‐named Short‐Switchback Rhino [EDIT: actually it's not quite the same piece; this one lacks the main‐orthogonal W step]), if geometrically a strange one.

[the Hexmaster's] trajectory is really like DNA chain

In a very different way from the Helical Bishop aka Zigzag Bishop (as named by Fergus and Betza respectively). I don't think anyone's ever combined the two ideas, though at that point we start reaching the limit of reasonable move complexity (and a full cycle needs a Really Big Board)

Axeman (also Halberd) is Charles Gilman’s Caddied Pawn

Strictly speaking Gilman's Caddied Pawn can only make the forwardmost captures (per his usual definition of FO). I suppose this'd be a Supercaddied pawn? It's not really clear given that the super‐ prefix normally affects the noncapturing pawn component too

Also whilst I apprectiate the attempt, using the name Aanca for the t[FR], while historically more accurate, turns out to be a bit confusing after it was associated with the t[WB] for so long. I'm all for avoiding it in the latter context, but in that case it's probably better to just avoid it altogether imo.