Comments by JianyingJi

excellent game,

one of the illustration has the wrong coloring for the squares. The 
second set in the middle of the page, board2 should have the opposing
coloring

It is quite amazing to me that the rook remained so consistant over the
years. It is the only piece that is in all the historic variants, from 
shatranji to shogi. So if one really want to trace the history of chess,
the rook probably is a important part of that.

quick note: web page for  Andrew Bartmess and tridim chess has changed 
to  http://www.grigor.org/tactical.htm

I think the question is essentially, if a player has a choice of 
perpetual check, or a different move. Can s/he chose the perpetual check
instead of the other move. which is covered:

http://chessvariants.com/d.chess/eternal.html

So I think the answer is yes and charles's friend is probably right.

I was thinking along these lines sometimes ago, but my ideas never geled
into a playable game. So it very nice to see some incarnation of it. 
Absolutely cool!

interesting variant, I wonder if giving king a knight's move would make
the king too hard to capture. With all those combo pieces, it seems only
fair to give the king a bit more movements too.

Quite interesting variant. With simpler army building then standard
CWDA, since only three piece types define a army rather than four.

An interesting variant might be to add the following rules:
3: No FIDE captures allowed
4: Win by pictorial mate.
5: Super-Ko no position maybe repeated

Another way to balance 1 and 1/2 move chess is to have white accumulate
at 1.45 moves instead of 1.5 this way after a 20 move game white will be
off by exactly 1 move that it is penalized at the start for.

I wonder what is effect of symmetry of starting setup on strategy.
Comparing Shantranj and Chuturanga, it occured to me that one has
radial symmetry, while the other billateral symmetry. Which one has
better balance?

This list is quite comprehensive, and quite impressive. Which makes it 
doubly strange that the odds chess has not persisted in any serious way 
in chess clubs today, especially organizations such as FIDE to determine
the rating, handicap correspondence.

Chess had not had a tradition for handicaps, especially in the last 
100 years. (Before that in the 18th 19th century there was odds chess
which I thought looks like a good and fairly comprehensive system, but
strangely it does not seem to have been adopted by organizations like 
FIDE) So, recently I being thinking about handicap systems and thought
of a cross between shogi and chess that would provide a path toward 
handicaps. What I propose is then the weaker player given a set of tokens
that give him the ability to drop captured pieces as his own for the
price of the value of the piece he is too drop. In a even game the second
player receive a small set of tokens to balance first mover advantage.
If both player play with infinite tokens, the game becomes chessgi. If 
one side plays with infinite and the other player 0 then the infinite 
would probably have a guarenteed win. If both side have a limited supply
of token then the game would have a finer balanced hadicaps.

These are just some ideas, any comment welcome.

Since pieces never disapear from the game, in shogi the values are all 
positional. That is pieces in hand can be considered as just another 
position for the pieces to be. and that value is assessed for a position
taking into account of the positions of all pieces including those in 
hand and whose turn it is. So in a sense it is more like go, only 
holistic evaluation can be done.

Thanks for the response. I have thought further, and thinks that the
dropping handicaps that I proposed suffers from similar flaws. Perhaps
the most chesslike handicap is to give the weaker side the chance to
augment the army temporarily. Say a set of tokens which for the price 
of one gives the pieces to take a step to an adjacent non-occupied 
square. One such token will probably be enough to even the odds between
the players when given to the second player. It would convert some draws
to wins and losses to draws. Though I could be wrong, for I am not too
good at judging these things.

Draw margin is dependent on the skill level of the play. In high level
FIDE chess, as the recent competitions have shown the draw margin can
be as high as 66% of all the games. It is so bad that some competition
actively try to discourage draws. So draws can be a problem. And I think
any chess variant that allows exchange to draw that is sacrificing
material to force opponent into draw, is liable to have larger and larger
draw margins as skill level increase. But ultimately it is an aethetic 
decision on whether this is a bad thing.

Cool!

one thing I find a bit aethetically off is that linking is not compulsary
in that player could ignoire linking completely and play normal chess. So
to satisfy my twisted aesthetics I would recommend following changes as a
sub-variant:

0. Twinkie Danger Chess rule apply unless contradicted below.
1. White start on board 0 and black start on board 1
2. King remain on the board they started

In this sub-variant no progress can be made without linking, so linking
becomes crucial way to mobilize your forces.

Thanks for everything hans. Best wishes on hans' other projects in life
and hope to see hans dropping by in comment section once in a while.