Comments by benr

I'm afraid I've never had Zillions, so I'm not sure about most of these. I'm sorry that my attendance of the site is sporadic; I go through bouts of being very busy with family and/or work. I usually check in and can take care of quick things, but fully reviewing pages or digging into source code get left for later.

What's with the external link warning? Is it a https thing, or wanting the www part? I'm working on the review queue on mobile, so I can't dig into the code right now...

Another note about mobile: the "add comment" link was missing (comments section removed, historically to reduce content loading on mobile). I normally just click "list comments" and go from there, but without existing comments there's no "add comment" link from there! (Viewing desktop site on my browser worked to get here.)

The description of Peacemakers should be clear without the reference to Duck chess. It's just a neutral king-moving obstacle, yes?

I don't understand the second win condition. Treasurers convert by capturing, not moving adjacent to, right? And then why the note about the treasurer getting captured in the next move?

Why do treasurers switch sides "as many times as it takes"?

When placing a Watcher on the earthly domain, a player has to make sure that his own King will not be in check if it turns out to be an enemy piece.

Does this mean it's illegal to move a watcher if any possible piece it could turn out to be would give check?

I don't really understand the treasurer immobilization; so you mean that even after the one immobilization turn, they can only move without capturing?

I've removed (commented out in the html, really) the reference to Lichess. If this game is ever added there, then you can edit the page to include it (or better, use the Lichess tag).

Interesting. Probably not a "chess variant" by most folks' standards (but that wouldn't stop me from publishing).

The scoring desperately needs some examples. The freezing of secured territories is particularly confusing. And how do larger territories score or become secured?

@Daniil: Parton's Ecila was on (asymmetric) 2^6, and the Variant Chess magazine took up an interest in fleshing out rules. See https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/ecila#notes.

Two questions from my last comment remain unanswered:

Why do treasurers switch sides "as many times as it takes"?

To add, that phrasing sounds like there's some sort of chain reaction that could happen, but I don't see how that would work?

More generally, I think the description of the treasurers could be made clearer? They (1) convert pieces they capture, placing the converted piece on any empty square, (2) only give check by a king's move (cannot capture the king by queen's move), (3) upon their own capture, are converted as in (1), and (4) cannot face each other along queen lines. Oh, (5) cannot capture two turns in a row. Is that correct and exhaustive? Can you (likely rephrase and) move that into the Pieces section to fully describe the treasurer?

When placing a Watcher on the earthly domain, a player has to make sure that his own King will not be in check if it turns out to be an enemy piece.

Does this mean it's illegal to move a watcher if any possible piece it could turn out to be would give check?

If you leave a section blank, it won't be rendered; that's preferred for e.g. your Setup section. Maybe the pawn movement rules should be moved to Pieces?

I found the first bullet point confusing, having not yet read the others.

"Progressive" in variants usually means increasing moves per turn; the title could be confusing.

This was submitted this week. Note that I'm still approving submissions from May. While this one is short and easy to moderate (so might skip the line a bit), please be patient.

Replicating the local conditions (say, the 3x4 rectangle) before the example would be helpful for following along. Formatting the scoring in a table may also be nicer?

I didn't see anything in the example that seemed to match this rule:

Two, or more pieces of the same kind ( two or three, or more Knights, two or three, or more Rooks etc.) controlling a territory have their values multiplied first (before being added to the overall value of the group).

An omission, or did I misunderstand?

I don't think we have a way to upload images directly from our editor (ckeditor); you have to have a valid web url for the image.

That said, your small image seems to have worked. Perhaps the data of the image itself works, but for larger images you run into comment length limits in the scripts/database?

Hi Ristet, thanks for the heads up, I'll remove it.

@editors, I think I had modified the tag display script to--when logged in as an editor--include the tagging users. Did someone [accidentally|intentionally] revert that? It made it easier (it could be done entirely through the website, without going into the database) to scrub related errant tags.

Apparently there's a copy in one of the big library chess collections, in the Netherlands: https://www.worldcat.org/title/67814114?oclcNum=67814114

Yikes, I'm sorry you've had to go through so much additional effort Jean-Louis.

Are you familiar with the version history tool Fergus added? It's under the Edit menu, and lets you view, compare, and restore previous versions of the page. It's sometimes a little fickle, though that might've just been related to a server move?...

Anyway, keeping local copies is probably a good idea.

We should restart a discussion around the text entry editor we're using, CKEditor. Switching to a new text editor would be painful, but we might be at the point to do it, if we can find something suitable. Or would it be enough to switch to Markdown as the default format? Or have HTML format work without CKEditor (keeping that just for WYSIWYG format)?

Done.

@editors, I think the Primary Group ID for rules pages and for Courier preset landing pages is being generated differently, the former without hyphens and the latter with them in place of spaces. Reconciling that would make this work more automatically more often?

I added another gorgon image.

Either that wasn't successful, or something funny is going on: I only see the figurine image.

I don't think these images add much to these pages. I'd rather see them in a separate article. To the points about different piece sets/themes, you could aggregate similarly themed examples into a "set" article.

The counterpart BWND is obviously a highly-Br[w]ain'ed rodent.

That's so tortured a stretch, I'll help those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinky_and_the_Brain

Can I assume the corner cells are deleted so you don't have to work out what to do with the diagonals there?

If a pawn or spear find themselves on an Open face, there are two (or all four, on faces 6 and 19!) directions that are "toward" the enemy Home face; how do they move then?

Playing on the 2d surface has the nicety of rook lines still actually restricting the enemy king into one side or the other. What does mating material look like here?

I tried to work out (but without paper) how many squares a rook attacks on an empty board. There are 12 faces that it reaches in each direction, but those overlap, I think four faces in common? So it should be 5*12*2-4-1=115 (that last being the rook's current cell)? What about the bishop, or nightrider?... Oh, I guess bishops aren't colorbound?

Is there a reasonable way to flatten this for displaying on a table/screen? (I suspect not, because of the forking of paths.)

Does the setup section's use of "clockwise" actually make sense?

Why alternate ordinary and berolina pawns? Doesn't that hurt pawn structures? (Does it just not matter on this wacky board?)

Playing on the 2d surface has the nicety of rook lines still actually restricting the enemy king into one side or the other. What does mating material look like here?

I'm not sure I understand the question.

For starters, can two rooks force mate against a lone king? If the corners weren't removed I think they could. Two queens probably suffice? Maybe it's best to see if this has been resolved on the surface of a 3D cube first...

But yes, the Bishops are not colorbound, strictly speaking. It's not possible, on a cube's corner (much less a tesseract's), to have a colorbound check pattern. I didn't realize that when I put four on each side, but then I decided that it wasn't that big of a deal; switching is a trick that requires rounding a corner.

I'd like to try to work out a bishop's path (and number of attacked squares) partly for this reason: it might be possible to effectively wrap around corners by going the long-long way around?...

Clockwise as seen by the player on the 2D board.

But I'm not sure that makes sense, in the same way that clockwise isn't unambiguous in 3D: it depends on from which side of the surface you're looking.

I read this a while back, wasn't clear on the rules, but never commented to ask. Going over it again, I can't bring myself to try to figure it all out. While part of that is me being tired, I think another part of it will affect other readers. Please try to simplify the presentation of the rules, and reduce the use of all-caps. Possibly a shorter word than "superimposed", and ones that are more varied than "superimposed on" and "superimposed upon" would also help.