Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

The description seems to use the terms 'earthly domain', 'celestion domain' and 'board' inconsistently. When you say 'bring a Watcher onto the board', you seem to mean 'into the earthly domain'. The board is 11x11, and the Watchers are already on it.

Any empty square in the "celestial domain" becomes available for the game.

What does this mean? Does it become part of the earthly domain, so that Watchers can now be moved to it and flipped there? Or does it mean that ordinary pieces can enter the celestial domain, but through non-captures only?

Peacemaker moves as Duck in Duckchess.

One additional move by either moving a Peacemaker one square in any direction, ...

This is not how a Duck moves in Duck Chess...

Watchers cannot be moved into the game if there is no empty square next to them.

This is not a new rule, but a (rather obvious) consequence of the fact that the Watchers move like a Queen. Better omit it.

Watchers could be represented by neutral checkers pieces, allowing them to be flipped over in order to reveal their power. 

This is not a rule, but a suggestion how one could play the game over the board using 'woodware'. Such suggestions belong in the 'Notes' section of the article.

When placing a Watcher into the board, a player has to make sure that his own King will not be in check if it turns out to be an enemy piece.  

A player cannot place a Watcher next to his own King.

The second line seems to follow from the first, but not entirely. Can the Watcher be placed a Knight's jump away from your own King if you are sure that it cannot be a Knight, because all enemy pieces with Knight moves already have been flipped?

Treasurers can never be removed from the board. When captured, they will switch sides as many times as it takes. A Treasurer cannot be captured twice in a row.

What does this mean? Does the capturer survive, and if so, where will it end up. Where will the collor-flipped Treasurer end up? If it is an adjacent empty square, what happens when there is no such square (which could happen when it is captured through a Knight jump)?

I might need some help with drawing the diagram and I would really appreciate it if someone could help me with this. 

How about just writing a FEN for the position between [fen ] and [/fen ] tags? That shouldn't be so hard. You would just have to pick suitable images for the unorthodox pieces from the Alfaerie piece set, and put their ID in the FEN. Or, if they do not have a single-letter ID, write their full name between braces {} in the FEN.

Thank you so much for your feedback. I have just finished making all the suggested adjustments. As for the board, I have tried to make a 11x11 board but I only get a 11x5 board. How do I change that?

As for the board, I have tried to make a 11x11 board but I only get a 11x5 board. How do I change that?

Hard to say what you are doing wrong when you do not even say what you did...

The rules are much clearer now, but some issues still remain:

* You use the phrase 'next to' apparently also for being a Knight's move away. While the intuitive meaning would be limited to a King's move away. This begs the question of whether a Watcher can be placed a Knight's jump away from the enemy King when not all Peacemakers have been revealed yet.

* You say pieces other than Watchers can be moved to empty squares in the celestial domain. But can they also be captured there? To capture they would obviously have to move to a square that is not empty. You don't say anything about that. I suppose it must be possible to capture (or check) them, otherwise the players would withdraw their King to the celestial domain at the earliest possible moment. The rules in that case would be more easily phrased by stating that the entire 11x11 board is accessible to normal pieces, but that they cannot capture Watchers, and that Watchers cannot only move to the eartly domain.

About the rules themselves: you do have a rule that prevents a Watcher can be revealed as Peacemaker close to the opponent's King. But I think it should be a much larger worry a player would place one next to his own King. That would provide him with a very easy way to win in the next move, by approaching that Peacemaker.

Just updated the rules and the diagram. I only need to figure out how to add a neutral color to the Watchers and the Peacemaker.

I see you used the Diagram Designer. When you set 'Set Group' to 'Automatic' (and press Update!), and then 'Set' to 'Auto Alfaerie PNG' (again Update) the piece overview will also show black, red and green circles. You could use those for Watchers or Peacemaker.

The 'knightguard' symbol there is what is normally used for a piece that moves as a Knight or a King.

BTW, I am able to add other images to this group, so if you have a suggestion for what to use for the neutral pieces, in what color, I could provide it. E.g. non-royal pieces that move as King are usually represented by the 'guard' symbol. So it would make sense to represent the Peacemaker by a differently-colored (grey?) Guard. Similarly, the Watchers could be represented by Queens of that color (as this is how they move). Or they could be a grey circle to resemble the draughts chips that will likely be used in over-the-board play to represent them.

I had a look at the set you suggested but I think it would be great if we could update the set we already have with some custom neutral figures. Since this game is called Celestial Chess we could make some angel looking figures with wings. For example, the Watchers could be red, and the Peacemaker yellow, or grey if you prefer it. Who knows, some people may like this game and feel the need to continue using neutral pieces in their future games. But you don't have to worry about making perfect figures. Anything simpler will work as well.
As for the symbol representing the Heavy Knights, that could be changed. No problem. Thanks a lot!

The problem is that it is not easy to expand that set, since it is not an 'Automatic' one. For the latter I would only have to upload an image to the applicable server directory, and it would automatically become selectable by an ID derived from its filename in the Diagram Designer.

All Alfaerie pieces from the SVG set can in principle be rendered in every size and color through the piece renderer used by the 'Diagram Editor with Scalable Graphics', so making differently colored versions of existing piece glyphs is trivial.

Ok. Just updated the diagram with the Automatic set. Please let me know if there is anything else that needs to be revised/changed. Looking at the diagram I realised that Peacemakers could come to a King very close and very fast, and I had to change the winning rules. What do you think? Could giving Peacemakers the power to immobilize nearby pieces be a good option?

I uploaded some new images to the alfaeriePNG set:

First I designed two new SVG pieces: checker and checkerking. Then I also uploaded grey versions of those (which the Diagram Designer then will not recolor, so it does not matter if you request those as white or black piece), as well as for guard and queen. These are called nchecker, ncheckerking, nguard, nqueen.

If you want you could use nguard for the Piecemaker, and nqueen (or nchecker) for the Watchers.

Thank you very much. I have updated the image trying both nqueen and nchecker. I think the last one looks better.

Since the red and blue pieces appear to be the same color on the e-ink screen of my Likebook Mars, I am posting this alternate version of the setup to test how it looks on the same device.

On e-ink screens, the grey pieces look more different in color from the blue pieces than the red pieces do, though they still look closer in color to the blue pieces than they do to the white pieces. I tested both versions on my Likebook Mars and my Kindle Scribe, and I compared a different version on each device side-by-side, then switched them. Based on these tests, I would recommend grey over red, and I would recommend a lighter grey over the current shade of grey.

The grey is hard-coded in the SVG pieces, where only 'white' filling (actually #f9f9f9) will be recolored to make the 'black' pieces. The grey (#909090) remains untouched. It should be easy to replace this by another color value with a text editor, though. Would #a0a0a0 do, or should it still be lighter?

An alternative would be to redesign the pieces with some dotted pattern for filling.

Based on further tests using my monitor's ePaper mode, which turns the screen monochrome, I would recommend #BDBDBD for the shade of grey. I got this value by taking the highest value in the blue color of #5984BD and applying it to every component of the color. The current value of #909090 has each component only slightly higher than the middle value of that color, which may account for why they look more alike on a monochrome display.

OK, done!

OK, done!

Although it looks like you have updated the SVG images, you have not updated the PNG images this diagram is actually using. They are still colored #909090, and their timestamps are from before I got up this morning.

Oh, I thought it was using the SVG. I now uploaded new PNG too.

I believe this game might be ready for publishing. Please let me know if there is anything else that still needs to be worked on.

Please let me know if the updated rules meet your requirements. It's been a long time.

I understand that this is a volunteers based community but why is taking so long for a reply? I am willing to help myself if given a chance. Maybe we can invent something that would speed up the process.

I think I just gonna give up. I don't understand you guys. Why is taking so long? I know, everyone is busy, but why don't we allow games to be published first on a forum, or something, where people can make suggestions, in order to speed up the process?

Unpublished content is hidden only for non-members. We already can make suggestions or revisions (but not publish it because we aren’t editors).

I also have this issue :)

I understand your feeling. I had not paid attention to your proposed variant before. I've seen many proposals here which are arguable, but yours looks good as far as I can tell. I'm not an editor though. I hope you will not give up, we are not a big crowd interested by these eccentricities.

Thanks. That gives me hope. I am also working on a chess variant for mathematicians called Mathematicess. That is much more complicated but still original. I only want to publish original stuff.