Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

239 already? You should make a page listing all of them so that people like me don't have to scroll through all your comments to find them, just an idea though

I've been maintaining a document to keep myself from doing more repeats (though it's failed on at least one occasion), and to make it easier for me to find things. I've also actually been considering putting them up as a page, possibly transferring all the comments there. Certainly I'll do the former by the time I reach #366.

240. Fish Pawn. The Fish Pawn (often called just Fish) comes from Fish Chess, and while that game hasn't gotten a lot of attention the piece has been listed on Who is who on Eight by Eight and the Generic Chess Piece Creation System, as well as Pick-the-team Chess (not to mention a couple of my own games).

The piece has all the moves of an orthodox Pawn, including the opening two-space move, but is also capable of moving one space backward.

This is a case of a small difference that can, under the right circumstances, make a big difference in an actual game.

241. Axe (Executioner). This is yet another weapon from a Clue expansion that I'm considering for Clue Chess. This piece, as I'm proposing it, moves normally one space orthogonally, or leaps (1,2) like a Knight for captures only. (WcN)

Now that I look at it, this may find its way into one of my other games.

I actually was surprised at how well this model turned out. I doubt anyone will feel inclined to do a hatchet job on it. #BadPunNoCookie

Next on your list, Titans, Cyclops, and other scary creatures from Titanic Chess.

At least a few of those will be coming soon, have no fear. Not right away, but I'll see what I can manage. :)

242. Left Rotor and 243. Right Rotor. This weekend's matched pair came as an admittedly quite strange inspiration. Each is a divergent Nightrider/Rose combination, but how they move depends on whether the initial Knight move goes to the left of the orthogonal, or the right.

In the case of the Left Rotor, the move to the left of the orthogonal gives the piece a Nightrider move, while moving to the right gives a Rose's move -- but only counterclockwise. (hlNNhr(afl)N)

It should come as no surprise, then, that the Right Rotor moves like a Nightrider if it starts to the right of the orthogonals, but like a Rose if it starts to the left, but only clockwise. (hrNNhl(afl)N)

Originally I was calling them the Left Finger and Right Finger, because if you take the Rose and Nightrider moves that pass through the same space (Nightrider outgoing, Rose incoming) they look like a little like a hand with a pointing finger. Even so, I think they'd work well with a Left Rotor on the left side of a setup and a Right Rotor on the right.

As presented, the Rose move allows the piece to return to its origin point (if the seven intervening squares are all empty), effectively allowing a "null move." If you don't like this, just put a 6 (or even a 5) after the (afl) part of the move.

Of course, there are many possible variations on this idea, perhaps the most obvious being reversing the direction of the Rose moves (using (afr) instead of (afl)). Other possibilities include replacing one side or the other with a Quintessence ((al) or (ar)) or Worsen ((abl) or (abr)), only using left or right as the starting move, using a Zebra for one or both sides, and more.

And with the Right Rotor you can now see the inside of my Rose model, and I'm still conflicted about whether to fill in that top. Doing it and leaving it as-is both have their arguments in favor.

244. Zebra Crab (Ferzzreb). This is one of the pieces from the Zen Zebras set that HaruN Y created for Chess With Different Armies, and one that I find interesting. It essentially takes the four Knight moves of the Crab (the two forwardmost, and the two that go sideways and backwards) and adds the single diagonal step of a Ferz. (FfbsZ).

It's about as powerful as a Knight*, and makes for a decent substitute.

Of course, the original name of Ferzzreb offers nothing in the way of piece imagery, but Zebra Crab let me take my Crab model and add stripes to the shaft. There probably are even better ways of doing the piece, such as a representation of an actual zebrida.

*The XBetza Sandbox gives it a value of 293 vs. the Knight's 295, While the Play-test Applet scores them at 250 and 252 respectively on an 8x8 board. I'd be curious to learn what scores other systems give the two pieces.

Other possibilities include replacing one side or the other with a Querquisite ((al) or (ar))

By which I assume you mean Quintessence? ;‌)

I'm among those who are not so big on the leaping riders, but I'll admit these are pretty cool. And of course sliding analogues (R or B plus chiral qK) are also possible

By which I assume you mean Quintessence? ;‌)

Yes; I'm pretty consistent in getting those two names mixed up. I'll go correct that shortly.

I'm among those who are not so big on the leaping riders, but I'll admit these are pretty cool. And of course sliding analogues (R or B plus chiral qK) are also possible

Probably they'd be chiral qF and qW respectively, making them variants on the Queen. But it's a decent idea.

245. Lame Nightrider. This simple piece is exactly what it sounds like: a Nightrider  that doesn't Leap. ((naf)nN)*

Whether the same space must be open on each step, or the piece is allowed to alternate, is a matter for debate, and probably should be left up to the designer. (The Interactive Disagram system on this site, as exemplified with the Play-Test Applet and the XBetza Sandbox, blocks progress if either intervening space is occupied beyond the first move, which doesn't seem right.)

The model is the one aspect of this piece that isn't quite so simple, even though it consists basically of a Knight with Rider wings and Lame wheels.

*Instinctively, this should be nNN or nN0. However, the Interactive Diagram system here doesn't seem to recognize those two ways of doing it, so I devised a Betza code that would simulate it. (@H.G.: Is this an oversight, a bug, or a necessary design flaw?)

246. Cue Ball. This is another quite recent invention of mine. The name just popped into my head, and I started to wonder how I could make it work in a chess variant. Working out the XBetza for the basic form was surprisingly easy.

The text description is like this: the Cue Ball moves like a Queen, but cannot capture. Instead, it can displace any piece, friend or foe, and cause it to move Queen-like in the opposite direction, either directly or after a 45° turn. (mQpafhauibcdQ)

I would've liked to have added to the XBetza to let it do this multiple times in a cascading shot (up to 3 displaced pieces for illustrative purposes), but the code I came up with just didn't quite work right. I also wanted to be able to push a friendly piece into an enemy one to capture the latter, but again it didn't quite work right in practice.

I'm not sure, but it might also be possible to designate certain squares as "pockets," and pushing any piece into one means that it's captured.

I like this model; it came out much better than expected. (You can't really see it from this angle, but the back of the platform and shaft has a partial sphere scooped out as if it's a hole in a pool table.)

247. Manta. This is an early creation of mine, and one that I've been putting off posting because the model is, in my opinion, desperately horrible. I'm calling for suggestions on how to make it better.

As a piece, the Manta moves normally one or two spaces diagonally, or makes a rifle capture in an orthogonally adjacent space. (F2cabW)

Someone else may have created a Manta before me, that I couldn't find. If so, I'll change this (not deleting the above, but rather including the precedent).

The first model is the one I made originally, using a manta figure that someone else had uploaded. The second is based on a manta model I made myself, though I think it looks like a robot built by a middle-school student with more talent in mechanical engineering than in ichthyological anatomy.

(And yes, I'm aware that the tail on both will be horribly fragile, but that can't really be helped.)

They both look too small. For a chess piece it ought to be something more stylized. Maybe just have the head (looking up) and fins, bigger?

They both look too small. For a chess piece it ought to be something more stylized. Maybe just have the head (looking up) and fins, bigger?

That might do; at any rate, it'd be an improvement (and with less to worry about regarding the tail). Give me a few days to work on that.

248. Peacenik. This is an odd compound that I came up with from my "Fifth Circle" set. I simply figured that, since there are five fingers, the moves of (1,5) through (5,5) could represent the five fingers, and a hand sign made by extending two or more might represent a compound. (Ignore (0,5) for this purpose.) So, someone making a modern "peace" gesture would extend the index and middle fingers; if the thumb is 1, then that makes (2,5)(3,5). But since it's a peace sign, it's not aggressive, and wouldn't be able to capture; its effect is that, if it could capture a piece, then that piece cannot capture. (mNXmAX, spell=charm, spellZone=NXAX)*

As-is, this piece is probably good only for fairy chess problems. For an actual game, I'd probably add at least mK to its move. Either way, it's a fairly weak piece, good more as a complication than a powerhouse.

Part of the reason I'd delayed in posting this piece earlier is that I have no idea how I can sculpt a decent-looking hand using Tinkercad. I'm trying to steer away from models that use parts taken from others' work. (If I had a 3D scanner, I'd just scan my own hand!)

*A spellZone beyond K, W, F, or N isn't currently supported in the Interactive Diagrams -- another reason I delayed posting this -- though I understand that that may change in the not-too-distant future.

They both look too small. For a chess piece it ought to be something more stylized. Maybe just have the head (looking up) and fins, bigger?

I think I made it worse (which I wouldn't have thought possible).

I was imagining the fins coming out from the side of the piece.

There's not much room for that. Even putting the wings out a bit wider than the base, the manta's not much bigger than the first one.

That's not really what I was thinking either. I thought you could have the wings be much bigger and coming out of the base, more vertical than that. Maybe it would look bad.

Maybe it would, or maybe it'd finally be a successful model. I'll give what you say a shot.

249. Oenophilist and 250. Janitor. Though the result was (to me, at least) quite interesting, the origin for this weekend's pair is admittedly rather ridiculous: I wanted an excuse to start a piece's name with Π(the single-letter ligature form of OE).

The only word that I could find beginning with œ (or oe) that seemed at all suitable was œnophilist (alternately œnophile), a fancy word for a connoisseur of wines. While it's a cool-sounding word, it didn't seem really practical to come up with a representative move for sitting around and drinking wine. But if I stretched the definition somewhat,* I could see this as a piece that looks like it's wandering up and down the rows of grapes at a vineyard.**

My initial inclination was to have the piece moving like a vertical Rook until it reaches the edge of the board, then stepping one space to the left or right and then continuing in the opposite direction. In devising a way to get it to move like that on the board in XBetza, I ran into several issues, among them not remembering how to detect the edge of the board in XBetza,*** so I went with what I could find. So, as a piece, the Oenophilist (or Œnophilist) moves vertically like a Rook until it reaches an obstacle, then moves one step to the left or right and returns in the opposite direction. (vRvgabsRvgabsyafaR)

Not that, in this diagram, the Oenophilist can either capture the Black Pawn, or use it as the obstacle against which it reverses course.

My next problem was coming up with the name for a piece that does the same thing, but horizontally. The movement reminded me somewhat of the cleaning crew at a theater or stadium, going back and forth through the rows of seats to pick up garbage. So, I decided to go with the Janitor. (sRsgabsRsgabsyafaR)

I think that these would work best on slightly-large boards (10x10 or 12x12), especially with Shogi-like overtones.

The models were a different sort of challenge. The Oenophilist suggested a wine glass, so I tried going with that. For the Janitor, I almost went with a broom and standing dust tray, but that seemed too light and potentially fragile, so I gave a shot at making a garbage can.**** With both -- especially the garbage can -- I'm not sure how successful I was.

*OK, with this it's practically out of shape. If it's too much for you, go with an alternate name such as Vintner or Winegrower.

**My home state of Oregon has been rather noted for its quality wines, though in recent years the increasing incidence of wildfires have spoiled some of our harvests. Still, if I were a drinker of wines, I'd be quite interested in Firesteed, grown only about 9 miles from where I grew up (and about 26 miles from where I live now).

***Should I find (or someone present) an XBetza that goes with my original intent, I'll edit this entry to reflect the correction.

****For those worried that chess pieces should be bottom-heavy, I hollowed out the upper part of the garbage can.

Board edge is o.

Is vRvoyambasRvoyambasyazR the piece you wanted?

Board edge is o.

That much I can remember. What I had trouble with was how to apply it.

Is vRvoyambasRvoyambasyazR the piece you wanted?

Pretty close. I think some parenthetical sections will be needed for what I really wanted -- to go back and forth repeatedly until reaching an obstacle.

This is the closest I could come to interpreting what you said:

The wings there are 32.5mm wide, over a 25mm base, and by this point I think it'd be better to just make the shaft shorter, like this:

This looks almost satisfactory, if I could just figure out how to make the surface more regular so the figure looks a little more manta-like.