Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Uri Bruck wrote on Tue, Dec 10, 2002 03:04 PM UTC:
Hello Dan,
First, thank you for taking the time to do the Zillions implementation.
I'll start with your first question:
'It seems to me that if the
second King can be checkmated, it can never be captured.  Are there
circumstances in which the remaining King can be captured?'

If a single king is checkmated, it means that there is no legal move to
take it out of check, however 'The king is the standard chess king, with
the exception that it may be moved into check, and it may be captured.'
It's ok for the checkmated player to make another move that will leave the
king in check, and then the king will be captured on the next turn.

At first it might not seem to make sense to allow a king to move into
check, and if you have just one left, it doesn't. Even if you have both of
them it's still not a great move, unless it happens to be a winning move -
a move that checkmates the other player. With two kings vs. one, the
situation could arise.
So capturing one king and checkmating the other is really the same as
capturing both kings, checkmating the second just means the second capture
is inevitable. If it's easy to code this, fine, if not, then that's fine
too, because it amounts to the same thing.

As for the third win condition, I haven't done any Zillions programming,
although I've read the manual and some code. Without seeing the code it's
difficult to answer. Perhaps the best answer I can give is that I prefer
people to playtest the game as it was submitted, but if you think it would
impact the AI, you can implement it one way, and then add the other
implementation as a variant. Then even if the AI in the 'official' version
is weakened, people can still playtest that version playing one another
on-line.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Cross-Eyed Chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.