Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

The Panncake can capture the Meatball from the starting position.

Panncake can capture Meatball from the starting position.

And immediately get captured itself, by the neighboring Rhubarb. It can also capture the Doughnut on the other side, with similar result. Either way, it's not much of a trade. (I found that out on a playtest. I have no clue why the AI thought that was a good idea.)

That is tasty.

Meatball is worth more than Panncake if the board isn't big enough.

The AI does seem to regard the Meatball as much more powerful than the Pancake, which I don't necessarily agree with but I'll run with it. I can rearrange things so there's only one of the most powerful piece (Rhubarb, according to the diagram), what the Pancake can capture out of the gate has a lower score, and the piece that's quadruplicated is the least powerful (Mushroom).

Hoppers tend to be worth only half of the corresponding rider. (Compare the classical values of Rook and Cannon in Xiangqi, showing what it does to require a hop for the captures, and then imagine what would happen if you handicap the non-captures the same way...) The AI guestimates the value basically from counting of moves the piece would have on a 25% filled board, assuming a linear increase of the enemy density with rank, counting captures double, and assuming somewhat above-average placement of the piece. And then applies a modest non-linear correction to account for synergy. The latter would not reorder the values, though. So if it guestimates a non-divergent piece to have a higher value, it means that that piece will in general have more moves under conditions likely to occur in the decisive game phase.

OK, I've rearranged things now, and it all should be better. Ready for further review....

"Also, if anyone knows of any already-existing food-themed chess pieces that aren't already in this game, let me know."

There are many, so I'll just mention some

Here's a list:

-John Lawson's Big Cheese, Crust, Perfect Meatball

-Charles Gilman's Cram

-Pieces from 1 of the Pikazilla's food themed chess variant

-Stuart Spence's Banana

-Ralph Betza's Profitterol, Cruller

-Etc.

I'll take a look at some of these later (I wish these had been active links). The Banana in particular seems promising. (I currently have two pairs of mushrooms, and I'd like to replace one.)

While I didn't use any of the pieces you brought forth, Haru, perusing them did inspire me to create the Pie. After all, what's a food fight without pie?

I'll need to test this a bit on the Interactive Diagram to make sure the Pie isn't a game-spoiler (zDDmbhK), but short of that I'm pretty satisfied..

I could see the Pie becoming a game-spoiler a bit too easily, so it's now znDDmbhK.

Now that I have actually bothered to look at this page due to my newfound job as Editor, I must say, this concept is hilarious.

The page is well-done and I relish the novelty (get it?).

P.S. Unfortunately, it doesn't want to show up on the What's New Page for some reason...

@A.M.: The What's New page relies on page contents being updated, not just the index information. You can manually update the Last Modification date from the edit index information page.

That explains a lot...

The author, Bob Greenwade, has updated this page.

Somehow this page, which had been published, got switched to Private when I gave it an edit earlier today. :(

somehow it says

Web page created: 2024-01-26. Web page last updated: 2023-11-25