Ratings & Comments

Duke of Rutland's Chess

Dropped Shinobi

Random Dropped Shinobi

Thanks! Colors look good, so the 2-square separation will work, and I've now entered the main "round" initial setup. Next up is adding the higher-dimensional moves! Done! Oh, and I notice that your diagram on the ID page has the Move Diagram with pieces on a non-central square: how do I do that?

Well, I suppose that part of the reason a Lion is so valuable is that it can so easily checkmate on its own. That makes it hard to predict the value relative to pieces that cannot. The most obvious method for taking away the mating potential would be to keep the piece devoid of Knight moves.

The Lion Dog in the interpretation where it can do 2-out-1-in locust captures might be more valuable. (But I don't really like that piece, as there seems no defense against this.) The Tenjiku Free Eagle might qualify on 15x15 (where the Lion loses importance due to its slowness, and the ability to move as Queen is worth quite a lot). You could even beef it up to a 'Super Eagle' by allowing also two Wazir moves per turn (QcaWcaFcabK, possibly also adding DA). Even QcabK could be pretty strong.

It would be hard to achieve the desired value without locust captures. Perhaps with hook moves (diagonal to avoid lone mating), but Tengu Dai Shogi already exists. If you plan to allow entirely new moves, AD rifle captures could be a useful building block. Unlike the Lion's igui these can attack steppers with impunity. And unlike the Lion Dog, you can defend against the igui forks by attacking the square it is on, as all igui moves end on the same square.

At the rate you guys are going with these, I half-expect you'll be able to make a diagram for Chess on a Tesseract by the end of next year. :)

I'm nominating Omega Chess.

Since that game I mentioned appears to be missing, the problem is that in games where the king castles onto the rook's location, the king disappears when castling.

I intend to keep all pieces that appear in Chu as they appear in that game, with the exception that the Lion-trading rules would be applied to the new power piece (PP for short). I was considering including a Lion Dog and Hook Movers. The 2-out-1-in move can be pretty easily defended against by placing a ranging piece behind the victim. But since that piece is pretty similar to the Lion and Tengu Dai Shogi already had that, I wanted something new.

I was initially thinking about doing some sort of short-range Ko Shogi-like rifle capture where the normal move cannot capture and the capturing move is an igui move, but also allowing both to be done once per move in any order. This creates the desired power gap between the Lion and the PP (power piece) when the non-capturing move is mKmNmAmD (Full Betza: KmNmScafmFcaba(mpa)1mK(mpa)1mpacabmK).

However, that raises a question: For locust movers that capture only once, do you need a bridge-capture-threshold exception like the Lion does in Chu Shogi?

Can a game really be balanced with such a numerical disparity?

Bridge capture is a rule for double captures, so it would never apply to pieces that cannot make those.

Umm, indeed. It seems I spoiled this when adding fast castling. There one always also has a 1-step castling possibility, and to avoid the ambiguity this causes it has to be entered as capture of the Rook you want to castle with. Normal 1-step castling also would require such a kludge, but so far was never implemented (because it occurs only rarely). So for normal castling moving the King on top of your own Rook would be interpreted as castling to the Rook square. The code I added to take care of the fast-castling case relied on the setting of a 'realto' variable, which would hold the true King destination if the input move put that at the Rook. As last thing during move execution the King would then be moved there. But in case of normal castling this 'realto' currently remains undefined, and moving the King there would make it disappear.

For now I let normal castling always set 'realto' to the King location indicated by the input move. This should fix the problem in Skica.

This means there is still no support for O1 castling. But when it would be needed I suppose it can now be easily implemented by replacing the destination of the generated move by the Rook location in the generated move when the King makes only a single step. (Which the fast-castling generator already does.) But that would still leave an issue in variants where the King can both make a single step or end at the Rook square. One then would have to design a move-entry kludge for distinguishing those moves. I suppose entering 1-step castling as RxK would not be very crazy, as in this case the Rook would indeed end on the King square (and it cannot be confused with any legal Rook move).

Yes, I have made some test and both side can win

You can do 1-square seperation like this:

I agree that it would be better with radial lines. These SVGs deserve to be improved, let's say that for the moment it is just a draft.

Omega Chess is now the featured variant for September, 2024.

The August 3rd comment is very interesting, but it appears that WHITE has been stalemated for more than one move. Another attempt:

WHITE TO MOVE - - - FIDE Chess allows 1.Ka1 a3, 2.Kxa2 stalemate

Since 2.Kxa2 is an illegal move in Sittuyin, it follows that 1... a3 stalemated WHITE.

Since 1... a3 is an illegal move in Sittuyin, it follows that 1.Ka1 stalemated BLACK.

Since 1.Ka1 is an illegal move in Sittuyin, a different move has to be played.

Hi all, I have a site I just released a web app that combines new pieces (royalty family, ghost family, equus family), spells (arcana - badges that are specific to a player that allow you to bend rules of the game like castling through check, alternate piece move patterns, and square conditions to name a few) - the engine validates and evaluates these rules as well. It also features a campaign that takes you through a story with technical and philosophical lessons, challenges and custom matches. Happy to discuss feedback or answer questions and share a link if it's allowed.

Since the layout of the article was a mess (text overlapping the images in my FireFox, and excessive indentation of the images), I tried to shape it up a bit.

I also put in a link to the Interactive Diagram, which by now is pushed back pretty deep amongst the Comments.

Thanks, I didn't want to be to advertise-y but it's open source anyway. It's tactorius.org.