Ratings & Comments

The suggested changes to the summoning rule seem overly complicated to me. I would suggest instead making the summoned pieces switch sides when captured, like shogi pieces. Then the players would want to be careful about losing the demon, since that would allow the opponent to summon it later. If you want losing a summoner to be more consequential, a captured demon could only switch sides if the capturing player still has the right piece to summon it back.

Summoning looks really overpowered, and we’re trying to figure out if we can keep the mechanic without it ruining the game.

Some ideas:

• Summoning just puts a piece on the board once in the game, akin to Seirawan (Sharper) chess.
• My proposal to give the other player an extra move after a summoning is done.

I mentioned Zillions, but, of course, Fairy Max might be able to implement the summoning mechanic to playtest just what compensation we need to give the other player when invoked (unrestricted extra move, restricted extra move, etc.).

There is nothing wrong with the mechanism of summoning itself. What wrecks things is that you automatically get the Demon back in hand when it gets captured.

Compared to how other pieces normally put themselves at risk when capturing a piece, this is like giving one piece a WMD. So, I would propose putting some kind of restriction or limitation on this.

Giving the opponent two moves, knowing that he has those, is too costly, though.

Where does this come in? Summoning is a full move, and I didn't see any mention of lettings players move twice in a turn.

Nevermind. I see it is a cost to summoning that Sam proposed. It's not in the creator's description of the game.

Since I didn’t make this clear: The opponent wouldn’t get to keep their extra move “in pocket”. When a summoning is done, the opponent then makes two moves immediately afterwards.

It’s true an extra move is very powerful, but having a replaceable piece which is only fully removed from the game when the summoner is captured is very powerful too. [1] If the two moves end up being too much compensation for the summoned piece, we can hobble that too (the extra move can not capture, one piece can not move twice, etc.)

I agree we need some playtesting to here to find out how much compensation we give the other player for the summoned piece getting placed on the board. It’s like changing the king’s move or how the pawns move: It changes the nature of the game enough that extensive playtesting is needed to see if it unbalances the game to the point it’s a forced win for the first player, or (especially if making the king too powerful) if it makes the game an easy draw.

This is also why I still like Zillions, some two decades after the program was last updated: Zillions is a relatively easy way to playtest game mechanics like this one.

[1] A game with summoning and drops can make the summoning less unbalanced too, since we can come up with some way of combining those mechanics to balance the summoning. Another option is to go the Seirawan route and only allow a summoning of a piece to be done precisely once.

Giving the opponent two moves, knowing that he has those, is too costly, though. In the opening you might get away with it, but in a typical middle-game position the opponent would use those to make a hit-and-run capture.

To be fair, Fergus' solution to that issue is quite elegant imo, and even just restricting two consecutive moves by a single piece alleviates hit‐and‐runs per se. It may be getting away from the intended point of this variant to introduce a whole nother idea but it seems like a usable way of introducing multi‐moves into a mostly‐single‐move game without breaking things too much