Ratings & Comments

Halloween approaches - an appropriate time for me to grab a shovel and dig up one of my neglected chess variants. I see that A. M. DeWitt has added a pair of Leos to each army in Hectochess. This looks like a very promising idea. In either game, a King and Champion can mate a lone King in 32 moves. My latest idea is ALPHA CHESS, placing the OMEGA CHESS pieces on 100 squares, with standard Pawns that advance one or two squares only, promoting on the player's 10th rank. No castling. I like the simplicity of this new game (DIAGRAM BELOW).

I came up with this idea after carefully examining Greg Strong's Opulent Chess. I now prefer his placement of Rooks, Chancellors and Archbishops, but would choose a central location for the Wizards (defending all eight pieces on the second rank). But we can debate the perfect initial position for TenCubed Chess endlessly, the same as Capablanca Chess.

After

1. Ze4 Ze7 2. Zh6 Kg10 3. i4 Zb5 4. Zxj9 Zxd2 5. Qxd2

Would you rather be white or black?

Alpha Chess960

There seems to be something wrong with the betzaNew.js script, as the diagrams with rims that use it (for example, this one) have their rims mauled, and Chu Shogi's diagram does not work at all.

I second Racing Kings and Seirawan Chess.

Info:

1. Seirawan Chess is playable against Pychess’ Fairy-Stockfish.
2. Racing Kings is playable on Lichess, and therefore is a) very popular variant with many games played and b) supported by Lichess’ Stockfish.

And:

Games in variants available on Lichess can be downloaded here.

A general question: Is there actually a ranking based on how often a variant has been played on Game Courier? That seems to me to be the real yardstick. Or have we had this before?  What do you think?

More likely the software the author was referring to was simply never archived (and may well have been all but forgotten)

2nded.

Sorry, I don't understand your text (I'm not a native speaker). Could it be a bit clearer?

I'd like to second musketeer chess also. Although personally I think this game is a bit crowded, it is a popular game. Also it does not have a too steppe learning curve.

The linked page has games in order according to number of games finished on GC, which is the closest we have to the inforation you asked about. But I don't think anyone's suggested using it as a kind of rating for games. One possible reason could be that the number of games played is quite small (CV's are a niche hobby!) except for the very most popular games (Shōgi, Chess, Sac, ⁊c.; only the first 15 games have over 100 games played) so statistical biases are quite likely; and the count doesn't take into account time, meaning that some games could have once been popular but now fallen out of favour, but would still show up with large numbers (I don't know how many, if any, this actually applies to in practice — probably it's unimportant with the small sample size anyway).

Thanks for the explanation. The idea does not seem to be practicable.

I would like to feature Atomic Chess as an example of what pieces with influence can do, but I am not sure how.

Done.

Here's the link, if you are interested: https://www.chessvariants.com/graphics.dir/svg/DeWittChuShogi/

The featured variant textbox is defined near the bottom of login/header.php .