Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Based on the experience of setting up the 14x14 variant, I would now do the 16x16 like this:

I was never happy with the Steward, so I replaced it by a novel piece that I called 'Scout'. I want this to be worth about 2 Pawns, so that it can take on a Pawn protected by a Pawn (if it has backup). But I am in doubt what move I should give it. Pieces with 4 captures and 8 noncaptures (e.g. Mat Winther's Alpaca) have this value, but are necessarily divergent. The alternative is a piece with 5 or 6 normal moves. But that would have to be asymmetric. In the Diagram above I chose mNcA, to not make it too slow, not make it color bound, give it two forward captures rather than one, and allow it to attack a Pawn without being attacked back by it. (The most suitable asymmetric alternative would be fhNbD.)

dear HG. No pb with your choice of names. After Rhitmomachy, Ouranomachy, Metromachy, we are into a secular tradition

OK, thanks! I also thought about 'Meteramachy' for 'Mother of Battles', but I suppose this is syntactically incorrect, because it would need the 2nd declination plural of 'machy'. So I suppose it should be 'Meteramachoon'.

(I googled for the declination of Greek nouns, to see how words ending with the letter eta would fare. And, belief it or not, the first hit I got actually used the word μάχη as example! :-) )

I wonder if there would still be market for an even larger chess variant. After all, Dai Dai and Maka Dai Dai Shogi have 2x96 pieces, which still surpasses the 2x80 of Megalomachy. (But 18th-century Buddhist Monks might have been much more patient than modern westerners...) On an 18x18 board, maintaining the 6-rank distance between the armies, there would be room for 6 x 18 = 108 pieces in each camp. But with so many ranks in the camp there is ample room for 12 empty squares in it without making it too easy to avert the danger of a suffocated mate. E.g. put the empty squares only on the 3rd and 4th rank, in the wings. That would bring the piece density to 60%, which I think is acceptable. The 5th rank, directly behind the Pawns, would remain fully filled, so the slow minors could be placed there to give them optimally fast access to the battle.

Compared to Megalomachy I could put two copies of all super-pieces other than Amazon (which then symmetrically pairs with the King). That would give an extra Lion, Queen, Griffon, Rhino, Marshall and Archbishop, while there would of course also be 2 extra Pawns. So that already makes 8 extra pieces. I think with so many pieces it would require an extra pair of ultra-powerful pieces (Terrorinos or Terrorissimos) protected by anti-trading rules to keep the game fluid . With so many super-pieces there would have to be a wider shield against flying attacks to shelter behind. (Just placing the shield more forward would make it too easy to slip behind it from the wings.) This would need an extra pair of pieces that block flying captures. The WD (which was not in Megalomachy but replaced by the Omega Champion WAD there) could be given this role. That leaves room for two more piece pairs. A good choice would be the Omega Wizard (as we already have the Champion) as a rook-class piece, and perhaps two extra Warriors.

The Terrorino could be a Queen that could also capture as a limited-range Locust: on the 1st or 2nd square in each direction, by landing directly behind it (i.e. a tuned-down version of the Teaching King from Maka Dai Dai Shogi). Or, if that makes it too strong, just on the 2nd square, and then also a non-destructive jump to that.

HG,

If you use the WAD, you may also think about the FAH as it works somewhat the same but with a bit more of a diagonal flavor.

FAH would indeed be a good choice for a 12-target leaper on a large board. In this particular case it has a bit too much overlap with the FH (Frog) and FA (Elephant) that I already have. When I used the WAD (Champion) it was as a replacement for WD (War Machine). Of course it still had overlap with the WA (Archer), but the latter is really a special-purpose piece here, because of its blocking power for flying captures. If I would have a need for upgrading another minor, the FAH would certainly be a prime candidate as a replacement for the Elephant or Frog.

Having two copies of most super-pieces really unbalances the piece-value spectrum a bit. So perhaps an 18x18 variant should have more 12-target leapers. On these large boards the leapers get weaker compared to the sliders, and consequently slider-leaper compounds also start to lag behind pure sliders. E.g. the difference between Marshall or Archbishop on the one hand and Queen on the other increases with board size. In particular pieces with 8 sliding directions become very strong, and Griffon and Rhino also belong in that class. So perhaps I should not have two Queens and two Griffons, and introduce another pair of rook-class pieces instead. A sliding version of the FAH (BH) might also be a good choice, to stay on the high-value side of the Rook. (The 12-target leapers also suffer from the large board, compared to sliders.)

I was running out of ideas for adding other rook-class pieces. Leapers with 12 move targets can play that role, but I dislike having pieces that just add 4 moves to a piece that already participates. This is what you automatically get when you use an oblique atom in them, as these already have 8 moves, and the pure N, C and Z already participate. As an exeption I do allow the Omega-Chess Wizard (FC), because it is a well-known and popular piece, while the Omega-Chess Champion (WAD) is acceptable despite its overlap with WA and WD because the latter two in the variant I am contemplating would have the special ability to block flying captures, which makes them very different even from a normal piece that would move exactly the same. Since all combinations of pairs of W, F, D, A already do occur as minors, the non-inclusion requirement would limit sufficiently non-overlapping 12-target leapers to compounds that contain both G and H. This leads to unattractive and difficult-to-master move patterns.

But then it occurred to me that pieces can also be weakened by making them lame, rather than reducing the number of move targets. A lame 16-target leaper might have a value similar to a true 12-target leaper. And lame leaps are not counter-intuitive. (In fact every distant slider move is one, and we understand sliding.) In particular, the following pieces seem nice:

• A (lame) Squirrel (nAnDnN, where the non-jumping N move is the multi-path Moo.
• The nHnGnCnZ ('Snake'), where the nCnZ part is George Duke's multi-path Falcon.

The heuristic of the interactive Diagram guestimates Champion, Wizard, Cannon and Bishop on 18x18 around 500 (where the 8-target leapers and Vao are around 300), the Squirrel at 600, the Rook at 650, and the Snake and Dragon Horse (BW) around 750. For comparison, Queen is valued 1350, Marshall (RN) 1100, Griffon and Lion around 1200.

Thus this Squirrel and Snake fit well in the set of pieces that can be traded 2-1 for a super-piece (plus Pawn). Or together with a minor for one of the weaker super-pieces.

This is as large as I want to go: 2 x 96 pieces on an 18 x 18 board:

Rather than doubling many of the super pieces, I only doubled the Archbishop, and added a new (anti-trade protected) monster piece in a single copy (the Terrorino). Compared to Megalomachy there are two more Pawns (wider board!) and two more Warriors. The remaining 10 extra pieces are new and appear in pairs: The Spider (a new minor, AH), the Omega-Chess Wizard and Champion, the (lame) Squirrel (NAD), and the Snake (lame GHCZ), all rook class.

The setup has a few 'air holes', to limit the density to 60%. These should allow reasonably easy development of most pieces. E.g. after the Lion is gone, the Rhino and Amazon have a nearly free diagonal (assuming 5th-rank pieces are developed quickly). And on the other Wing the Griffon can leave over the m-file, and the Queen along the diagonal that this opens.

The Spiders start rather backward, but by their H move they can jump over the serial defense shield, to reach the Bishop squares (after these have been developed, which should have high priority, as those files are vulnerable to Cannon attack). After the Spiders move on, the Marshall, Terrors and Terrorino can use those squares, as these are all jumping pieces.

There's a large number of pieces which would struggle to checkmate a king. A player that's behind would be tempted to capture all of their opponent's pawns and hope that there is insufficient mating material.

One suggestion is for pieces to be able to promote to themselves plus a king movement when entering the opponent's camp, with the idea of king + any being able to checkmate a lone king.

Some pieces would benefit more than others, though. Also, the game would become more complicated as the piece values would change.

Having most pieces promote makes the game more shogi-like than chess-like, and I would like to avoid that. For this reason I also specified promotion on last rank, rather than in the camp.

If mating potential would be a problem, I'd rather adopt the rule that a bare King loses. But I am not sure it would be a problem. Eliminating all Pawns when you are behind is easier said than done. When behind, you will not be in a position to gain them. So you would have to sacrifice them away, where each Pawn would cost you yet another piece. For the Rams that is fine, as these are practictically useless on a near-empty board, if not from the very beginning. But there are many more Pawns than Rams, and you would have to eliminate the Warriors too.

I have little doubt that 3 minors could checkmate a bare King, even on 18x18.

Thinking about the FAH (which I call Siege Elephant in my games) and the champion there is also the WL (That I call Mamluk) and the FL (the wizard). So you may have a variation on the game where the WAD and FL are replaced by FAH and WL.

See now why I prefer to make variations on the same theme? Or it could be just me being weird, I guess.

Actually I do not now how this goes with your other pieces. But if you replace the FA with WD it is probably the same.

Also, the craziness could go on, you know?

And another thing. Have you considered bent riders that bend after more then 1 move: the R2 then bishop or the B2 then rook? They probably work well in such variants.

Since these variants have so many piece types, I tried to pick mainly pieces that a player might already be familiar with. This is why I preferred WAD and FC over FAH and WC, and avoided bent sliders that turn after two steps. I had my doubts on FC, because I already have a pure C. But because it is such a well-known piece I considered it admissble. Other compounds of C plus a 4-target atom (such as WC) would suffer from the same lack of distinction with the pure C, and would not have the benefit of being somewhat familiar.

I could not afford eliminating the Camel itself, because there aren't too many totally symmetric 8-target leapers, and I needed everyone I could get to have enough knight-class pieces. But when I want to avoid including pieces that differ from each other by just having 4 extra moves, that leaves almost no 12-target leapers.

The idea to give the Ram a large speed without giving it a large value by giving it Grasshopper-like non-captures can be applied to more-valuable pieces as well. In particular the short-range leapers would benefit from it. When the Elephant gets an extra diagonal hop (FAmgB), and the War Machine an extra orthogonal hop (WDmgR), they can get quickly deployed to distant locations. I will call this 'air lifting'. The Prince could get this instead of the forward double step (KmgR).

With an adjacent blocker the air lift would coincide with the A or D jump the piece would have anyway, so on average this gives not many extra moves. So it won't drive up the value too much. An alternative would be to only give the pieces cA an cD, so that the mgB or mgR air lift replace the mA and mD part of the piece.

In a similar spirit, the Prince could get its non-capture K moves replaced by the move to the most-distant square on a Q trajectory. (Like in All-the-Way Chess, cKyafpoabQ). Perhaps stopping just before the obstacle is also more natural for the other minors than landing immediately behind it.

I am still in doubt wheter I should add an air-lift move to the Knight as well. As it is also of range 2, it deserves to have one. But there doesn't seem to be a natural choice for it. With the FA and the WD I could use diagonal and orthogonal slides, respectively. Then these pieces can already reach the first to squares on the path. By using a move that stops just in front of the nearest piece, rather than hopping over it and landing immediately behind it, there will only be extra moves when the nearest piece is 4 or more squares away. This does not give much extra value, especially not for a non-capture-only move.

If I give an air-lift move along an orthogonal to a Knight, though, it has no targets in common with the original move pattern. There are already extra moves whenever that direction is not completely blocked, so the effect is similar to adding a mW or mF, which adds about half a pawn to the value. And I don't want the value to be too high, to prevent harrassing by a Vao.

Perhaps it is an idea to give the Knight hippogonal air-lift moves, in the vN directions to have only 4 of those. Then it least has the first square in common with the original moves, so that there are only extra moves when the nearest piece is 3 or more knight jumps away.

Have you considered gryphon or manticore air lift moves for the knight?

No, I did not. Problem with these moves is in general that they are not reversible. But I suppose that air-lift moves are in general not reversible anyway, unless you were standing next to a piece in the opposit direction. So this would not really be a problem. Nightrider moves have the problem that it is not so easy to see where the first obstacle on the path is.

Since I only want 4 air-lift moves, the Snake Tongue (vW[vW-fsB]) could be a good choice. (Better than the Ship, where the moves would be very close together, an sideway speed is still small.) Problem is still that even though the original Knight move is on the path, it is the second square of that path. So if the Knight move is blocked (or a capture), there would be an extra vW move. A half Unicorno from Grant Acedrex would not have that problem, though: it would start its slide on the N squares. So a Narrow Knight move, followed by an outward diagonal slide. I like that idea. All air-lifts would then start with a move of the original piece, followed be a Q move.

I guess it is simpler to just require a minimum distance for the air-lift moves by rule, than to effectively cause this by having the closest moves overlap with already existing moves. So to the Knight we could add a diagonal airlift, with the restriction that it should land at least 3 steps away. The Elephant and War Machine/Champion can be imagined to have that same restriction, as they could land 1 or 2 steps away on the air-lift path through their usual moves.

HG, You have sort of abandoned this thread for a while, and to me it is a very interesting discussion. The min 3 steps idea seems very good to me. I was contemplating something these days in relation to centennial chess. In that game you can move twice before the first capture. Maybe for such a large variant you could think about introducing the double non-capturring moves at any time. The games tend to become rather localized otherwise. Or in contrast to that you could use more leapers with long leaps like say a (4,1) leaper. Or you may replace the wizard (as you already have a camel) with (1,1)&(4,1). This will give more of an over the whole board sensation. On the other hand too many forks from such leapers could lead to a sentiment of randomness. And also easily jumping the pawn chains is rarely a good idea. What I'm proposing the is to have long path movers (like the falcon from falcon chess) with more (say 16 or 20) destinations!

I was running out of ideas for how to speed up such large games. And for the variants I had in mind (14x14 and 16x16) the ideas I already discussed seemed sufficient for making those playable. A fundamental issue is that it takes at least as many moves as you have pieces to move all your pieces. And it sems silly to have pieces you would never get to moving. I suppose that this would not be so bad if there was such a large variety in strategies that you would use different subsets of the pieces in different games, so that in the long run all pieces get used equall often.

I guess another way would be to incorporate aggressive multicapture, which initially would quickly destroy the majority of the pieces before they moved. So that depending on how the opponent would use them you would be left with different subsets of the initial pieces, small enough to use them all without making the game unduly long. E.g. a piece that would capture as in Atomic Chess, destroying itself in the process. Players would be under pressure to use these pieces quickly, while the population density is still large and the strongest pieces have not yet been traded, to cause the most destruction.

I don't like leapers with very long leap. There is basically no defense against those; they can attack you with forks from within a safe location that you cannot reach. If you make them lame leapers, they get too easily blocked.

Hi, HG.

I've been following this thread off and on, as I have a fondness for what others see as huge variants. I would argue that when you come to something like this: "A fundamental issue is that it takes at least as many moves as you have pieces to move all your pieces" you are seeing a restriction that may not need to be there.

Chessplayers as a group seem to be inherently conservative, and highly resistant to significant changes to any version of chess, and even minor changes. So something as radical as suggesting a multi-move approach to speeding the game up, which it will, leaps past heresy directly into the depths of anathema. So be it. Use 2 moves per player-turn to speed up the game. If that is too radical, allow an optional pawn move each turn. Move a piece and a pawn each turn, with no requirement to make the pawn move.

@HG,

I agree with you that very long leapers are bad design because of being very hard to defend against. On the other hand if you give 16-24(I'm more for 16 and maybe accept 20) path mover (lame leaper) moves they become useful. The reason for that is that moves from the opponent in the mid game need to be calibrated so that it won't unblock such pieces. These path movers (lame leapers) in the mid game threaten terrible forks but are quite useless in the endgame providing an interesting strategic choice for the players. I like the strategic choices that are offered by unblocking paths (this is why I use all sort of bent riders). In exchange I don't like having many leapers. A disadvantage though as Jean-Louis always says is that these moves are difficult to see by humans.

One should not confuse moves with turns. Allowing multiple moves per turn doesn't shorten the game in terms of moves. You just re-order the moves.

@HG,

The non-capturring moves are non necessarily about shortening the games. Giving the fact that it complicates calculations, the game could be very well actually longer on the clock.

But, maybe having this rule reduces the locality of the turn. Things could happen easier in multiple parts of the board so many more pieces contribute to the decision making.

Your choice of aggressive capturing pieces (probably lion and fire demon) it shortens the games but I don't think it makes it more interesting. It could very well make it barren of strategic concepts!

I was thinking about pieces that could only be used once to inflict great damage. E.g. like a Fire Demon, but which also disappears itself on capture. In Tenjiku Shogi a Fire Demon is 'priceless', since it can continue to inflict damage for the entire duration of the game, and this will add up to more that it could ever destroy in a single trade. But with a kamikaze piece the damage stays limited, albeit large. If there is no defence against it, you must simply accept that a certain fraction of your army will be destroyed by  this without having been used. But it could be a different fraction, depending on the defensive strategy you employ. After the kamikaze pieces are gone it becomes a normal chess game. And if you wait too long using the kamikaze pieces chances are that you cannot do as much damage with them anymore, because population density went down.

Perhaps a Grasshopper that explodes on capture, destroying itself and all adjacent enemy pieces would be an idea. It has great forking power, so that the only defense against its attack is deciding which pieces you sacrifice to it.