Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I have created a preset for this game. But I don't particularly like it so I won't post it in a separate page.

Link : /play/pbm/play.php?game%3DMissing+Bat+Chess%26settings%3Ddefault

This uses the Zebra variant.

Thanks for the reference, George. Looked for games, found 1 that's on turn 1. It hasn't gotten a lot of action since it's been posted. It has its good points. For example, it's a short range game, having notably more short range pieces than 'infinite sliders'. Among its bad points: it has a whole bunch of short range leapers that are knight analogs. Aside from the knight [well, maybe including the knight], these pieces are all awkward to use, and as their ranges get more and more elongated, they get more and more awkward to use. Note the Bat of the game's title does not appear in the game being played, nor is it recommended to be used in standard play. In fact John Savard specifically states it should not be used, it is there for problems, not play. 

It appears to me this game was put together by a problemist more than a player. Six of his pieces per side are among the most useless around, alfils and dabbabahs. And they are carefully set up so one side's alfils oppose the other's dabbabahs. This is the problemist's mind at work, not a player's.

This is not a bad thing, except our discussion recently has been on playability, and in this game, you will be fighting your own pieces as much as your opponent's. That limits its appeal to the more cerebral types. And unless someone blunders, or conversely, is utterly brilliant for several turns, this will be a long game. Again, this is a matter of taste, but it limits the game's appeal even more. 

Me, I don't like difficult pieces; the simpler the better. But I have no objection whatsoever to long games. I don't actually like games that are really short. I figure games should probably fall into the 30 - 100 or so moves range and this would give reasonable time limits for the possibility of good chess games. Too much shorter and you are losing strategic depth. Too much longer and you could probably cut the game down in size profitably. 

One last point. These games are at a size where it makes sense to look for something in addition to the standard mechanics of chess just to handle all the pieces and play a game in a reasonable amount of time.

I don't get it. This is not playable, nor is it interesting. So why do people keep inventing these over-complicated variants? Nor does 'crooked' piece movement make any sense. This site is flooded with this type of variant, so the good variants, which are *playable*, and can have an impact in the future, gets drowned in all this muck. Such creations only serve to deter people from taking an interest in chess variants. If some of the chess hardliners want to make variant enthusiasts stand out as unrealistic fools, then they need only link to this type of variant. 
/Mats

> ... except that the 50-move rule is replaced by a 500-move rule, ...

:-)))

In practice it is unplayable because it is exhausting to play, and even to learn. Nor has it been proven that it even works. 
/Mats

Leaping Bat seems to play with a fairly standard set of fairy pieces. Is there anything in particular about this game that makes you estimate the amount of moves it could take to play as you have?

Or are you saying, that any game played on a 16x12 board, with a similar set-up to Leaping Bat, (full row of pawns and two full rows of pieces playing at either ends of the board with at least the same amount of one square movers and similar piece strength/variety) would take this long?

The words 'a fairly standard set' set me off wondering how easy it could be played with distinguishable FIDE sets. With 1 aside of 6 piece types, 2 aside of 11, and 4 and 16 aside of the remaining 2, 3 sets cannot do it, but 4 can. I began by assuming that 2 sets' Pawns would be ignored, but then realised that it would make sense to use half of one set's Pawns as Alfils. When I laid everything out I realised that the last set had only two piece types in use. This made me wonder whether I could substitute a more exotic set for the third and fourth. A Xiang Qi set would again not quite do it, as using only four Points aside would mean only 15 out of 16 pieces. A Shogi set, however, did the trick and I finally hit on the following representation:
	FIDE set 1 - all pieces as themselves.
	FIDE set 2 - King as Bat; Queen as Nightrider; Rooks as Tigers; Bishops as Camels; Knights as Giraffes; Pawns as Pawns.
	Shogi set - Rook as Gryphon; Bishop as Rhino; paired pieces as Wazirs, Ferzes, Men (aka Princes), and Walkers (aka Stewards); Points promoted as Dabbabas and unpromoted as Alfils.

Mats, i do not think this game should suffer from any type of exhaustion.
If two people sit down to play the game over the board, they do not have to play the game to the finish, it can played over a few sittings. I do think playing by email though would be best.

As far as mental exhaustion goes, due to the large amounts of different moves available that will arise during the game, this is not fide chess, it is a game on a very large board. One would have to use their intuition and feel for the game, you would have to disregard many moves that on appearance there would seem nothing wrong the move. There would be too many moves to analize, so you would have to do your best.
Would this add a greater element of luck in the game, i would say definitely yes, would this make the game unplayable, i would say definitely not.
I'm not sure what game people play on game courier that would be the closest to Leaping Bat, would it be Cataclysm?

Cataclysm plays on a 16x12 board with 16 pawns like Leaping Bat, but Cata has 24 pieces to LB's 32, so that is a fair difference, and the piece strength also in Cata is greater than LB, so this is probably not a great example, but still it must give us some indication i think.
Amazingly i have noticed that a couple of Cata games have been completed in under 80 moves, another seems to have gone to around 350, if memory serves me correct. Obviously, it appears that Cata is indeed playable.
In the interest of the study of big board games, if anyone knows another large board variant, at least 16x12 board, played on game courier, could you please post to say.

Savard is mathematician and this is satire too a little overdone.  I mean Bat as root-65 leaper?

Can the Bat reach more than the 16 squares shown in the diagram of the 12x16 board? If so how many squares are ultimately reachable by Bat?

Besides the Bishops and the Bats, what other (several) piece-types are unable to reach all 192 squares and how many can they reach given the set-up array?

This is a large game featuring all 'elemental' fairy pieces. The weird ones are Rhino (a circular K-rider), Griffin (which on the first two squares of its path can only capture), Tiger and Walker (divergent compounds of B/N and W/F).

And to make some of the previous discussion clear: I did not want to imply this game would take an extrodinary large number of moves. I was just wondering what the use of a '500-move rule' would be. Such rules are meant to force a stubborn player, who doesn't want to admit he can no longer win, to prove his point by making progress in a reasonable time. But 500 moves doesn't seem reasonable. Would there be any practical example of a position that would take more than 400 irreversible moves to win?