Ratings & Comments

The author, Lev Grigoriev, has updated this page.

Good day, just small reminder. Please look at linked comment.

Ozymandias by Chris Huntoon, AKA hartunga

Very good and cute, noting that pieces move only straight. By the way making two different colors for dark squares also will be useful.

It appears that this Jocly preset for Chu Shogi is not invoking the counter-strike rule in the following cases:

• for the first part of a non-Lion multi-move after any type of Lion capture.
• if a Lion is captured only on the first part of a non-Lion multi-move

Hello.

I think it's a very nice take on the mini-chess, that feels different from Diana, Mallett, or Los Alamos variants. I believe that the closest relative of this variant is 5x6 chess, with the same feel of all possibilities of orthodox chess, but faster and less complex. This variant is definitely going to take its place in my game library. Thank you for sharing!

Squirrel Chess

One further tweak I'm thinking of making to the rules is to let the Decoy move to an attacked space next to its King. This would increase its attacking ability in the endgame, allowing a King + Decoy vs King game to play like a King + Centaur vs King game. But it would not decrease a player's knowledge about which spaces are attacked around the Decoy, because the King would still be unable to move to any attacked space next to it. By checking where both pieces can move, a player could still tell whether a Decoy move next to its King would be safe.

Another alternative I was considering is that a Decoy could move next to the enemy King. While this would also allow the Decoy to behave like a Centaur in a K+D vs K endgame, it would impair the Decoy's ability to avoid check and to detect the enemy King.

One more alternative I was considering was to allow the Decoy a one-time demotion to a Centaur. This would remove its disinformation sowing and intelligence gathering abilities and give it more attacking power. I even considered the idea of letting most pieces demote to lesser pieces, which could be an effective way to sow some disinformation when a piece is about to be captured, but that's probably going too far.

Well, what programmers would have to specify for configuring the Diagram, and what users will finally get to see as a result of that, are completely independent issues. And I am usually a lot less considerate towards programmers than towards users. It is also worthwhile to have a unified method for specifying things, rather than completely different methods for each feature. Irregular promotion zones are already specified in the I.D. through a FEN-like board image, not through a case-label-like list of square coordinates.

What I would want the user to see in a variant with pieces that have location-dependent moves is a piece table with a separate entry for each possible move (so that the user can request move diagrams for each case selectively, by clicking those entries). And the name fields in the table should then get a list of squares where this move applies appended to them. Certain shorthands like a1-h4, or dark/light squares could be used in those lists. The image could be the same for all these entries, or different, as the Diagram's creator thought best. Personally I like to be able to see unambigously how a piece moves from its image, without having to deduce it. So for the Elk Chess Diagram I used a different representation for the Elk on light and dark squares (a Pegasus when it moves like a Knight, a Rook where it moves like a Rook). For Xiangqi I would be inclined to use the same Pawn image on both sides of the River, though.

As for configuring the I.D., I have been experimenting a bit with a new parameter moveMap, embedded between the piece definitions. This can define a FEN of lower-case letters abc..., where a then refers to the preceding piece definition, b to the one before that, etc. This map would than define the morph boards of all the piece entries it refers to. (While the existing morph parameter would define morphing in terms of piece ID rather than sequence in the table, and apply only to a single entry.)

As a shorthand for defining the various moves a piece can have I experimented with the possibility to write a comma-separated list of move descriptors in the field of the piece definition where normally the (single) move descriptor goes. The Diagram script would then automatically expand that to a separate entry for each move in the piece table, with all identical properties except for the move. This would work in cases where you want the piece to be represented by the same image everywhere. This is only useful, though, if the list of squares to which the move applies is appended automatically to the piece name; this cannot be done by hand when the name dield is automatically duplicated. This would require some smartness in the script for recognizing rectangular areas (including files and ranks) or square shades.

Considering that so very few variants would make use of this feature, I wonder if the latter is worthwile...

Rotate Symmetry Elkrider Chess

Or use friendly capturing pieces, or use relay pieces, or use backup moves, or use atleast 2 type of pieces with different promoChoice.