Comments by nelk114

I finally tracked down where first I found this piece proposed: A CV subreddit thread proposing it (and its inverse) among several others. The name ‘Nabber’ is not terribly inspiring though (and confusingly similar to the proposed names for the other related pieces). And it turns out to have the mFmAcWcD you asked about too, though again ‘Stuffer’ is perhaps not the greatest of name choices

I only just noticed it reading the card, but it's true of the page as well: you seem to have the Gryffon and Rhino the opposite way round from the conventional usage

See also Gilman's Fiancé(e) (and ofc the matching Widow(er) and Comedian/‐ienne); same logic, slightly further along in the relationship (presumably to avoid his slightly more narrowly‐defined boy‐/girl‐ prefixes)

I think this makes the first time I've seen Gilman's Caddied Pawn (your Axeman) in actual use :‌)

This would ofc be equally interesting with more different pawns on a larger variant

(and as for the name, I don't necessarily disagree about the ‘aka’, but either suggested name is fine afaict — and it's less verbose than some of the other games on these pages)

It is indeed a nice page, and about time we had an accurate description here without having to dig through comments!

I was wondering about the decision to keep the literal translations of the Spanish piece names rather than going with the animals (real or mythical) that they actually meant (not only per the illustrations but also per the textual descriptions), as per the translation notes on your own page. I.e. Aanca ≡ Roc, Cocatriz ≡ Crocodile, and Unicorn ≡ Rhino.

Also actual modern Spanish would have ‘Gran Ajedrez’, not ‘Grande’; it's one of a handful of apocopic forms used when preceding a noun.

Congratulations indeed!

I agree with Ben here; especially given that we have Tags for making the finer distinctions, it'd make sense to keep categories boader.

Your Diff-PieceRules suggestion would cover all of these adequately imo. And if we deem it useful we can always have Promotion:DiffPawns; Promotion:ByCapture; ⁊c tags (or Rules:[such]). Indeed we already have Fusion, Fission, and a couple of Promotion‐related tags

ranks and files will sometimes border each other along a common edge.

This is common among non‐flat spaces; most multiplayer square‐cell boards have the same property (indeed some are effectively on cube surfaces, giving exactly the same effect seen here), as does the board of my Spherical Corner Chess.

However, [the Astra's] shining debut is still not happened...

Well, the piece itself has turned up before, in a couple of minor Gilmans; it's the Newt there, following Problemist usage (extrapolating Frog)

To every second space (read more attentively)

‘Every other space’ means the same thing in English

There’re many hippogonal movers, pieces that ride orthogonally or diagonally; what if there’ll be pieces who ride hexagonally?

It's certainly an interesting way of describing the Hexmaster (previously described by Gilman as the admittedly uninspiringly‐named Short‐Switchback Rhino [EDIT: actually it's not quite the same piece; this one lacks the main‐orthogonal W step]), if geometrically a strange one.

[the Hexmaster's] trajectory is really like DNA chain

In a very different way from the Helical Bishop aka Zigzag Bishop (as named by Fergus and Betza respectively). I don't think anyone's ever combined the two ideas, though at that point we start reaching the limit of reasonable move complexity (and a full cycle needs a Really Big Board)

Axeman (also Halberd) is Charles Gilman’s Caddied Pawn

Strictly speaking Gilman's Caddied Pawn can only make the forwardmost captures (per his usual definition of FO). I suppose this'd be a Supercaddied pawn? It's not really clear given that the super‐ prefix normally affects the noncapturing pawn component too

Also whilst I apprectiate the attempt, using the name Aanca for the t[FR], while historically more accurate, turns out to be a bit confusing after it was associated with the t[WB] for so long. I'm all for avoiding it in the latter context, but in that case it's probably better to just avoid it altogether imo.

This was in fact the basis of an earlier Gilman name for the Newt/Astra: since it was in the centre of the Rose's circle, he called it a Rosette (and correspondingly he had names for the centres of other oblique roses).

Fwiw he calls the q[FD] (not valid XBetza, but valid original Betza as per one of the Really Big Board pages) a (curved) Alpaca.

The authentic arabic plural of dabbāba is apparently dabbābāt. But English doesn't usually bother preserving Arabic plurals so Dabbabas is perfectly fine and will be more widely understood

Why not Infanta and Inquisitor for RA/BD? The latter is alas subject to a collision with Bob's name for another piece (which might suggest retaining Bede; it's not great, being a name, but it's at least suggestive) with a superset of its move, but Infanta is otherwise unused.

Gilman suggests (in Diverging Further iirc) Dragoon for Derzhanski's Drake

@Bob: Begum at least is a preëxisting term, though distinguishing it from other aristocratic titles could ofc be tricky

EDIT: I didn't see this thread had been continued elsewhere

As Bob notes, Badger exists but apparently only on the obscure end of piece names: Taikyoku has at least one kind, as does Man and Beast 20. Ofc since Taikyoku is in any case loose with its naming and Gilman's Badger is Hex‐prism‐exclusive so no problem there, and it's nicely mnemonic.

Likewise, Ram has some prior use, not only as the Advancer but also in a couple places as the Siege device, as well as in H.G.'s Megalomachy; since these are typically square‐board pieces it's perhaps a little more contentious.

Rat seems pretty much unused, if perhaps an odd animal to associate with rooklike moves

Is the knight component of the empress western‐ or chinese‐style?

Does the river have any effect other than enhancing pawns upon crossing?

How does the promoted princess move?

This is a really rather pleasant‐looking piece mix :‌) And an unusually ungimmicky (promotions aside — though in their way elegant too, particularly in the little detail that a promoted pawn needs at least two more moves to promote further) use of the Frog

Unfortunately, only three Frogs per game can promote to Tsarevnas

This is an additional rule? It's probably just me but the way it's positioned in the article makes it seems as if it should be derivable from the other rules…

In any case, I take it that means that a frog that reaches the far rank while there's already a Tsarevna on the board (or there have already been 3) simply remains as it is?

@Bob:

Peter Aronson almost went there, but decided to add the fD move too; as it stands the ‘Silverfearful’ appears only in a couple of obscure Gilman Shōgi variants as a promotee

@J‐L:

I didn't get the idiom either when I first encountered it in Aronson's write‐up (linked above), and haven't seen it anywhere else in the wild; apparently it goes back to Southeast‐Asian cultures, where white elephants were considered sacred, but receiving one could therefore ruin you as you had to maintain it but couldn't e.g. put it to work

Re

Do you take notes on these things, or something? :D

I'm actually a really atrocious note‐taker — never learned to do it and never found much need; I have a good memory and that's easier to look up that written notes. That plus the search engine(s), having been here 10+ years at this point iirc (active for nearly 10), and in Gilman's case the fact that for all its density his stuff's actually pretty well organised once you get the hang of it, is quite plenty to build up a bit of context

Ofc the cute ‘Infanta de Castille’ pun does actually make that an unusually mnemonic name for the RA, even by Gilman standards; I always found ‘Inquisitor’ the harder one to remember

That's… oddly disconcerting, at least at first. But very cool

A quick test w/ the ID suggests ꝥ the lovers are the (absolute) royalty

In existing games such as Tai Shogi or Maka Dai Dai Shogi, these peices are placed on the respective edges. I tend to disagree with this, since it basically cripples the forward diagonal moves.

The counterargument

Asymmetrical pieces deserve rather more exposure imo :‌)

Strictly speaking, Mojibake refers not to an encoding but to the effect of a mismatch between (writer's and reader's) encodings.

What had happened to this page, as well as many others (incl. several of Gilman's, f.ex.) is the same that had happened to this page (cf. the comments); it should be fixable by the same means: converting from UTF-8 to Windows-1252.

Also yes, the leftmost number in the Finch diagram should definitely be a 3

There's so much confusion surrounding the names for [Gryphon and Rhino] that I'm on the verge of just calling them Merv and Fred. (I'm not entirely kidding.)

And all that because Murray mistook the latter's move description and doomed it to periodic reinvention… Could be worse; they could have as many different names as the RN and BN

De facto this proposal to name the W-then-B a Manticore […] turned out to be a bust; everyone using that piece seems to use a Rhino to represent it. […] Better switch to calling it Rhino…

Whilst as Fergus notes this is not quite true, I would be very tempted to redress the Piececlopedia page to have Rhino as the main name if and when I get around to updating it (I have a file of notes sitting around but have yet to actually do the redraft). The issue I originally noted of the name clash with (another existing page)[/piececlopedia.dir/rhino.html] persists, but it would hardly be unique in that respect.

Though oddly enough, even Rhino as a name seems to only have really taken off after Manticore had established a (however small) presence. It's almost a shame I only read Meta‐Chess after writing that page; JWB calls it a ‘Hydra’, which would have been arguably near‐ideal

And as for graphical representations, I remain partial to Alfaerie's four‐bishops icon used e.g. in the Piececlopedia page: suggestive and devoid of naming controversy :‌)

Aardvark

A nice choice :‌)

the "Overtaker R" on that list is the Chariot (attributed to QuangTrung).

That might be a reference that's possible to track down, though Quang Trung does have a rather large set of ‘editions’ with differences even among identically‐named pieces iirc. Perhaps one to look back up one of these days

I feel like I must echo A. M.'s reaction; I don't know whether I'd be the right person, but I'm honoured by the offer and willing to have a go.

And congratulations to A.M. on their appointment to the Editorship!