Ratings & Comments

@ Jean-Louis, Thanks for taking an interest for my games:

1. The board is colored in 4 colors because of the fact that the nightrider is easier to visualize this way.
2. About the XBetza notation HG I think made his point.
3. In falcon chess the falcon is a piece with longer read and more end squares than the leapers (knight). I wanted to do the same, so the Vulture is done. Also over there the falcon piece is rook strength at least. I wanted a rook strength piece so I added the extra just move jumps. They are jumps as the piece would be hard to develop.
4. The knight is enhanced to keep it the same strength as a bishop (who on a 12x12 board has a longer reach). On a 10x10 board those are too much it turns out making the enhanced knight 0.5 pawns stronger than the bishop. Hopefully in the 12x12 case this will be alleviated.
5. I did not want a color bound piece for the modern elephant. Also with the extra trebuchet power it is closer to the other minor pieces.
6. I don't like the camel and zebra because they are too clumsy to use so that in these 3 games so they have short range aid. I had noticed that the short range long range piece deliver quite interesting forks.
7. The thunderbird and firebird are bent riders akin the griffin and manticore. It is just they get the bending later. They also have extra moves in order to keep them in the queen value neighborhood. I like using bend riders because they provide more strategic decisions. That is because their riding property does not allow them to be immediately useful but only in tandem with the clearing of the board.
8. I'm not sure what are you asking by simpler rules, but these games are named apothecary because of the way old pharmacists were tinkering with substances trying to make a cure. As them did I try different ideas from which some admittedly a bit crazy in order to explore many possibilities. These 3 games are my first attempt at 12x12 boards and hopefully from working on them I'll get sufficient experience for my future designs.

Like Georgi Markov, I confirm that I believe that the name of the cited author is Tressau and not Tressan. Maybe the text of this page should be corrected, also because my book is cited (thanks). In this book, we used Tressau.

That being said, the gothic script which is used for the original German book is not easy to distinguish an "u" from an "n".

Thanks Jean-Louis for your interest.

This tournament has finished. The final classification is:

1. Daniel Zacharias 10 points

2. Erik Lerouge 9 points

3. Aurelian Florea 5 points

4. Oisin D. 0 points

Congratulations to the winner and all participants.

Maybe the text of this page should be corrected, also because my book is cited (thanks). In this book, we used Tressau.

Yes, sorry, this was a mistake.  I changed the name on the Emperor's Game page when I updated it but overlooked making the same change here.  I'll get it corrected.

You can even actually play Pandemonium on the bot-spam channel on Pychess Discord!

https://discord.gg/aPs8RKr

Thanks for running the tournament!

When I reverted the Futashikana Shogi pages back to their original form, they also reverted to pending editorial approval. This game has already been approved before. If an editor could fix this that would be great.

An influence display like the one in the ShogiVars program would be a really nice feature to add, especially for the really big games.

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!

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.

I am a native Korean, and so far it seems that people seem to disagree about the rules. The Fairy Stockfish one is mostly correct:

Bikjang is only a draw offer: it is not a check as in Xiangqi. Draw offers can be declined and has no effect on later play. Turn passing is always allowed, so no zugzwang. In official tournaments hosted by the Janggi counterpart of FIDE, the 1.5 point tiebreaker is always applied.

Also a note on the etymology of the word "Bikjang": "Bikjang" seems to have come from the word "Bi-Jang"(pronounced bee-jang) which is the pronunciation of the word "flying generals" in Korean. So yes, the Bikjang rule comes from Xiangqi, but it was changed to a draw offer with other rules as well.

One more thing. I am a relatively new person to the CVP, and I believe I saw some articles detailing some strategies in oriental games. However, I cannot find an option to do that. I'm sorry if this is an inappropriate place to post this, but can anyone tell me how to do so?

All these pieces can already be described through the general mechanism XBetza uses for multi-leg moves. The notation you proposed is much less general, and can handle only some very specific cases. E.g. D/W describes a W followed by D as well as a D followed by W move, as well as simple W or D moves. But what if there is a piece that only does simple W, or D after W? In XBetza you can describe each of these moves separately, e.g. mafmpafW would be a move that makes 3 W steps in a linear fashion (f), where the square reached in the first step must be empty (m), while the 2nd square should be empty or hopped over (i.e., its occupant is completely ignored, mp). That is, it is a W followed by D. The bent version would be mampafW, i.e. it would drop the directional f restriction after the first step. Writing an s there would force a 90-degree turn at that point.

It is true this makes the description of your  W/D a bit cumbersome (WDafmpafWmpafafW), but that seems justified for a piece that really has a rather elaborate and complex set of moves: three different ranges (WDH), the latter half lame in a multi-path way (can be blocked by two, but not by a single piece). By assigning a very specific (and therefore hardly ever useful) meaning to a certain notation, you can of course always be more compact in the rare case where that notation would be useful.

Note that when the Betza j modifier is interpreted as 'must jump over exactly one piece', the W/D could be written as WDnHjH, which is also not so bad. And at least allows the piece to have an nHjH move without having either W or D.

One more thing. I am a relatively new person to the CVP, and I believe I saw some articles detailing some strategies in oriental games. However, I cannot find an option to do that.

To do what?

I think mobile devices are suffering from a similar misalignment problem to the one I pointed out earlier. Whenever I load a GC preset that uses an image format on a mobile device, the hitboxes are misaligned, and the image is much smaller than normal. However, whenever I clear my browser cache everything looks fine the first time I load the preset page.