Comments by benr

Two of the games here are best seen as playing in full 3d space, just restricted to the outermost cells of a cube (Gilman's Empty Cube Chess calls it as such, while Judith's Cube-Surface Board Chesses doesn't seem to say it, but the merging of adjacent squares I think makes it so). The rest are actually on the surface (though several are incompletely described, and at least one is really just a circular chess board).

In the latter category, bishops aren't colorbound, and their passage through corners needs a decision. Playing on the surface also means all the pieces are more long-range. A rook can keep an opposing king confined to one face, patrolling the bordering cells from four other faces all at once from any such square (and sliding around to the other side if the king gets too close). Two rooks then force mate, guarding each other along that perimeter and performing the usual net on the king's face, just from its boundary.

One alternative, though, which you may find more symmetrical, would be to use 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and 60 instead of 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, and 66.

Bob has already done this in the Notes, except using 7 instead of the trailing 0. I don't immediately see whether one is better for a given purpose.

I think the Usual Equipment categories don't belong here?

But the first requirement for these categories is "can be played with a standard chess set", which isn't true?

Fergus, such a change should really be done after some time to discuss all the ramifications, and making all the code changes at once.

Diff-setup, diff-move, diff-capture all only really make sense in the context of usual-ish equipment, I think, along the lines of what you mentioned for setup.

I think Usual-Other should just become Usual; it's not necessarily "other" in the (vague) way the Other category is, it's just playable with the usual equipment without having fallen into one or more of the other Usual* categories.

Modest should be its own category. They will be a subset of Usual, at least until someone gives a convincing argument about a variant that should violate that pattern. I don't think it should be removed: it has useful signal, even if fuzzy, and many of the other categories are similarly fuzzy anyway (such is just the nature of categorizing [chess variants]).

Can you provide the scoring for the example?

In particular, are c5 and d6 "joined"? It's not clear from the description what exactly that means, and what "control" means.

The game end also seems a little fuzzy; won't someone just refuse to move as soon as they're ahead at the beginning of their turn?

I do like the simplifications you've made so far.

We should be careful not to explode the list of categories, and keep tags in mind. (It would be nice to be able to sort the tag listing by count.)

The Topic Index has links to usual-equipment listings that need to be updated.

Odd, I edited the content through the editors script, got no error, can see that a revision has been created, but the content is still empty and the revision shows no diff with the original.

I can't think of any outstanding questions now. But the rules are disjuncted and conversational, making them harder to parse (for me). I was planning on taking a pass at editing when I next have the time.

It is, but the link text is "3 to the 5", which is odd since the short description doesn't seem to match either. But I presume Gilman was the one who set these...

There were two recent requests to be added to this page:

• https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=52460
• https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=52461

But this page is a hard-coded html file last updated in 2002. I suggest we add the themes here as Tags instead, as appropriate.

I've taken an editing pass, mostly moving passages around for better grouping. @Florin feel free to modify anything that I've changed, but I think the only actual rule difference I've made is regarding territories with tied contributions from the two players: since they make no difference to the comparative score of the two players, but I think counting them as positive makes the score that's up for grabs easier to understand, I like splitting the value instead of zeroing it out.

In re-reading and -writing, I still don't understand merged territories. Does "if they can control them" actually mean something? (What stops someone from putting two empty squares next to each other?) Is scoring modified in any meaningful way? (I did replace "8 settler", "5 settler" and "3 settler" territories by "center" "side" and "corner" resp. in the bonus section thinking that's what you meant, but I guess if you have joined or even diagonally adjacent territories they mean different things.)

I don't know how to set up a simulation in musketeer board painter.

In the example endgame, in the newest edition of the rules black would get another move after white passes. I haven't stared at it for any significant amount of time, but I think e5 pushes d5-c5 looks interesting, depending on joined territory rules. It would put three black kings on the horizontal boundary of the new territory, and if it qualifies for the bonus that's worth 240 total (original plus bonus)? Perhaps that also suggests there needs to be a rule about repetition: don't want two opposing royals pushing a single piece back and forth.

If you were to limit the revision deletion to groups of revisions by a single author within a certain timeframe (a week? a month?), would it lose most of the size savings? It would be nice, IMO, to keep a longer-term history of an article, while squashing a flurry of small changes into one larger one.

But also, saving the diffs instead, why would that break things? The deletion of a revision would just result in the squashing of the two diffs, right?

I agree with most of this, but should spend some more time looking through the lists.

I don't like "stem" as the theme name, being too jargonic. I think two separate ones is fine, or even put math as a sub-theme of science. (This one will be huge depending on what exact criteria we place; board geometries are geometry, all 3d variants are math, ...)

I tend to think of "wargame" rather differently than "rpg". Wargame to me is more like Joe's variants, with lots of pieces moving in formations, while the descriptions here (esp. hit points, leveling up) sound more distictly like rpgs.

Are you sure you mean the What's New text, and not the Item Description? The former only shows up a few places, most notably the What's New page, while the latter shows up in most index listings, content headers, etc. You can modify What's New text in the index information and while updating the text, but for now updating the Description has to be done by an editor.

I updated the royal push text to avoid the interpretation I had before. There are still two things left to explain about it:

1. "lower" pieces: can a king push a queen, or does this just mean royals vs non?
2. Can a queen push a piece two squares, if there is a joined territory?

Fergus, please change the font color for last actions being Notification comments to green (or omit them in favor of the last action being the edit itself).

@FergusDuniho

I thought this was next on my list to fix the diagrams for (from a change in the diagram designer), but I'd already done the movement marker conversion. However, now I see that

1. two of the piece images don't show up, using the combination codes B!R and R!B. In the setup diagram these pieces use B.R and B.R instead, and they show up. Was there yet another change to the diagram designer for which we need to scan the database for broken images, or was this an old mistake?

2. in the setup diagram, the 0th rank displays offset (on my laptop); any idea what's wrong there?