Comments by BenGood

>>but that some of my votes on the games in the group will be based SOLELY on my impressions of the games simply from reading their descriptions, THEN I would be willing to volunteer to judge Group B. Please let me know if this is acceptable. <P> as i stated in my 'thoughts on judging', the first thing i learned when judging is that you can't just read the rules, you have to actually play the games.

your best bet is ebay. people who read cv.com and have a smess set are much less likely to be interested in selling it. i just did an ebay search - currently there's one for sale, it's at $17 with more than 2 days left, which is typical; in the auctions i've watched in the past, smess sets typically sold for $25-$35, sometimes higher. i don't know of anywhere else to get one. 'all the kings men' sets go for much less, i paid less than $10 for mine.

the game you are referring to is bughouse; it is mentioned on this page, altho hans did not provide a link to the bughouse page. on the bughouse page, he lists numerous alternative names to bughouse, altho 'double replacement chess' is not one of them.

i found this page interesting until i got to the part where it costs $100 to play. there's also nothing to suggest that any of the $6400 is being returned as prizes, so i don't know what it's being used for.

this zip file doesn't unpack properly, and it's enough of a mess that i wasn't able to organize it properly. all the bmps go right into the rules folder (a problem for those of us trying to keep our folders organized), and the zrf is difficult to find, a 'my documents' folder (not the one on the desktop, not that i want zrfs being put there anyway) is created inside 'rules', which contains a 'zillions of games' folder which contains a 'tree garden' folder (so we have three nested folders that contain nothing but the next folder) which contains the zrf, which of can not find the images, and still can not find them if i transfer it to the 'rules' folder.

if a flag is moved to a corner, turning on the bomb, and then the flag is captured or moves away before the bomb is dropped, does the bomb remain turned on, or does it turn back off until a flag is moved to a corner square again? i had assumed the former until i noticed that zillions considers the latter to be correct. looking at the rules page, it is definitely not clear. the zrf was written by the inventor, and therefore is probably correct, but i thought it would still be worth checking on.

thanks, this worked. for the benefit of future readers tho, it should still be fixed.

>>I've tried to make them as short as possible, hoping that playing with the zrf would enlight the shaden areas. <P> i feel i should point out that this is bad practice for writing rules for cv.com or anywhere else. readers are not necessarily going to have zillions, and even if they do, when reading the rules they are not going to assume that the zrf will necessarily clarify ambiguities for them.

nice pics. can you tell us the dimensions of the set in centimeters or inches? it would be nice if we had a pic of hans holding the set, so we can get a sense of scale. i've never seen little sets like that in the usa.

from the zrf it appears that in the mobilization phase, a player can move each piece once at most, but this is not clear from the rules.

my understanding of shogi is that because of drops, piece values such as given in chess are not meaningful or useful. in the fairbairn book he spends more than 2 pages (83-85) discussing relative piece worth and things you should take into consideration, and how you should think about it, and what other people say about the subject. but nowhere does he give values, and he says 'japanese professionals refuse to answer that question.' later he adds that he is trying 'to correct the distortion introduced by many western writers who insist on ascribing values to the pieces.' in other words, from fairbairn's perspective - and i've seen nothing in shogi to suggest that he is wrong and plenty to suggest that he's right - tweaking the values of the pieces in zillions will not make it play any better.

no zillions file for this game?

i notice this page is not updated past june 2002. also, if you link to the recognized variant list (which does not have it's own 'rate this page' link, ultima is not on that page even tho it is a recognized variant.

i noticed recently that the way zillions numbers the moves does not match the way they are really supposed to be numbered. which may not sound like a big deal, but it can make things confusing when playing by email and trying to track down an error. so i'm wondering if this would be difficult to fix.

i'm impressed with this list too, a lot of these i had never heard of before. i'm wondering tho if it isn't easier to win without a Q or queenside than it is to win with a capped pawn or capped knight. class E players are going to realize they can sack any piece for the capped piece and win. i doubt you can keep anybody from capturing your f-pawn if they really want to.

as far as i know, there is no site to play omnigon online. in fact, at the time i wrote the review (august 2002), a search for any omnigon webpage produced zero matches, altho i think fun agian games might sell it.

i'd caution against your use of = for 'other promotions.' = is already standard shogi notation for no promotion, and standard among problemists for stalemate.

apparently i never got around to mentioning this before... i noticed some time ago that zillions does not enforce the rule that a king in check can not make a drop move. this is a critical rule, and so it should be implemented if possible.

Steve: it depends on what you mean by 'in front.' if the king is diagonally in front of an opponent's pawn, where the pawn normally captures to, then he is check, and you couldn't have moved him there in the first place. (if you're playing a tournament otb game, making an illegal move usually means forfeit. if you're playing online, the server shouldn't have allowed it in the first place. if you're playing an friendly otb game, then usually you just redo illegal moves.) <P> if by 'in front' you mean directly in front of an opponent's pawn, where the pawn normally moves to but doesn't capture to, then to answer your question: no, you do not lose. whoever told you this either made up the rule or doesn't know what they're talking about. if you mean in front of your own pawn instead of an opponent's, again, there is no such rule. <P> hope this helps. <P>

the link to freeling's grandchess page is broken. the site was redone last summer, so stuff was probably moved around at that time. i don't have the correct url handy.