Comments by JorgKnappen

The Silly Sliders are one of the weirdest Chess experiences I have had. They are so strange: One attacks by retreating and unlocking the far range moves and one escapes from attack by approaching the figures. I'd suspect that the army is a bit weaker than the FIDEs because the ranging pieces can be stuffed. A blocking piece on the ski square doesn't even need protection. The rotated short range moves of the Onyx and the Duck have unusual interactions with the pawn formations.

All in all: A great design worth trying.

There is a typo in the German book title, it should read "seine" in place of "siene".

Also, I read the author's name as "Tressan" in accordance with Google OCR. There is a clear bridge between the two stems on the upper part of the last letter of his name. Google search finds the name on several pages where it seems to be removed from the pictures (Probably from bottom lines for the bookbinder, called Bogensignaturen in German language).

I have found the book on Google books here: https://books.google.de/books?id=n64UAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=Tressan&f=false

I cannot reproduce that problem, pressing CTRL-U in Firefox gives me a clean and readable source page.

Thanks Greg. Can you update the Emperor's Game as well?

Just a few days ago I created some diagrams with dots meaning plain and empty squares. I usually use numbers for fully empty lines, but dots for spaces in lines with pieces or decorations.

I suspect that there are more diagrams of this kind.

The new setup is mistaken, the Knights are between the Rooks and the Bishops, and the Bishops are on different colours, compare p. 77 in the book by L. Tressan here: https://books.google.de/books?id=n64UAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

The Castle is lacking the Alfil move in the diagram.

I am probably a bit late in commenting, but jAA has a meaning in Classic Betza notation (an Alfil-jumper-rider, i.e. a piece needing hurdles for each Alfil step it takes), and changing that meaning to something very ad-hoc is probably a bad idea. Either adding a new lowercase letter for slip-movement or attempting for a generic solution with different types of movement in the two legs of the move as in Betza's proposal t[FAA] would be better. Or new uppercase letters for the atoms slip-Rook and slip-Bishop.

Interestingly, my first draft from November 2001 had the fully lame Unicorns, and I am very interested how they fare in FairyMax. With Zillions of Games as an Oracle the original draft was considered too weak, and the the Unicorns were powered up with unconditional Knight's moves.

For the theme of the army, a colourbound piece is completely unsuitable although one can argue that a slip-Bishop still switches some bindings. But when it is too weak, what would be a good augmentation for it?

Thanks for featuring Quinquereme Chess with an interactive diagram! Unfortunately, there is a glitch in the implementation of the Quintessence and its compounds, it is lacking the lateral development like

f5 - d6 - c4 - a5

or

f5 - g7 - e8 - f10

I guess, the initial "hq" is too much and suppresses some moves. The Quintessence in Nachmahr without the initial two letters "hq" works fine.

Shouldn't the Rose have the move qN8 (including a zero move if the full circle is available) instead of just qN4? In the starting position after

1. k4-k5 ... it should be possible to play 2. Of2-f6.

Nice to see the Spotted Gryphon in this diagram, it is another difficult piece to describe!

The Beautiful Beasts are ready for publication.

It took me some searching on this site to find back the thread on 72 Capablanca Variants here: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?itemid=72+Capa+variants

This variant was already proposed by David Paulowich before 1996 and it is mentioned in the preface on Ralph Betza's thoughts on Outrigger Chess here: https://www.chessvariants.com/d.betza/chessvar/outrig.html

Paulowich's variant has no page on this site (there is Victorian Chess https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/victorian-chess here which is similar but with the Archbishop in the Queen's position)

I think I finally found it, it must be Nadvorney's Spherical Chess as described here

https://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/spherical.html

@Georgi Markov

Thanks for your publication on Sultansspiel and Kaiserspiel, and special thanks for publishing it in an open access journal. Now I finally know where that ominous "Ludwig Tressau" comes from.

However, I think that the common publishing place Leipzig is not suitable to draw far-reaching conclusions: At that time, Leipzig was the hub of German book publication and had the largest concentration of publication houses all over Germany. Also, Ludwig is the most probable expansion of the initial L. and may be an interpolation by Oettinger. The second most probable expansion would be Louise or Luise, a feminine name, and the fact that the author hides consistently behind the initial makes this possibility even more probable.

Having said this, Tressan is an extremely rare surname in Germany, and Tressau is even more obscure. I searched some huge databases of personal names (telephone directory and DNB Normdatei) and Tressan occurs once or twice, but Tressau has no hits at all. It should be feasible to identify that specific "L. Tressan/L. Tressau" using genealogical databases without sifting through too many hits.

While adding some tags here and there, I am thinking of tagging some more square boards and I need agreeable names for that tags.

Two are quite clear:

16x16 hexadecimal (from Greek)
20x20 vigesimal (from Latin)

But what about the other numbers 11, 13, 14, 15, and 18 (I leave out 17 and 19 just now, they are probably too odd)?

I'm thinking of

11x11 onzenal (from French)
13x13 treizenal (also from French)
14x14 quatorzenal (again from French)
15x15 femtenal (from the metric prefix "femto" 10^{-15}, ultimately from Danish 15)
18x18 attenal (from "atto" 10^{-18}, ultimately from Danish 18)

What do you think?

I don't like the khaki/smoke scheme and I think this can be pinned to the following two factors:

1. It does not from a well-defined board boundary on the present background colour (this is probably easy to cure with an outline)

2. The colour difference between the interior of a white piece and a light board square is just noticeable, but not really a contrast. This does not look right.