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I must say I am intrigued by what appears a very workable, easily grasped
variant with differing forces. One of better ideas in some time that I have
seen.

The idea of differing forces is a natural given the war-background of
chess, the key will be in the balance achieved.

About to re-summarize history of Chess Different Armiesl in follow-up, here are two other comments CDA one by myself, one by Muller:
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=24856,
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=24874.

Actually, I see now that I was wrong on the stalemate: Kxf2 would be legal, because it captures the Knight that was checking Kh1. Initially I hd that Knight on g3, but then it was not possible to pin the Hoplite on f2, so I moved it. An old-style General (R+N) on g3 would have done both the check and pin, but with G=B+K that does not work anymore. I guess a position that does what I intended is:

8 . . . . . R . .
7 . . . . . . . .
6 . . . . . . . .
5 . . . . . . . .
4 . . . . . . . .
3 . . . . . . . N
2 . . . K . h h h
1 . . . . . k k g
  a b c d e f g h

The fastest Spartan mate I could come up with, btw, it:
1. e4 Hfe6 2. Qf3 Cd6 3. Qxf8 Cb6 4. Qxe8# {White mates} 1-0

l g k . Q . w l
h h h h h . h h
. c . . h . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . P . . .
. . . . . . . .
P P P P . P P P
R N B . K B N R

The fastest duple mate:
1. e4 Wh6 2. Qh5 Kg8 3. Qh4 Cd6 4. Qxe7 Cb6 5. Qxe8# {White mates} 1-0

l g k . Q . k l
h h h h . h h h
. c . . . . . w
. . . . . . . .
. . . . P . . .
. . . . . . . .
P P P P . P P P
R N B . K B N R

Haaa! :)

The first end game study, made to clarify rules concerning check and duple-check, contained a flaw! Well, it did serve it purpose and it did clarify the point. 

This reminds me of the play testing we did. Because we placed “testing the game” as more important than “ruthlessly beating our opponent” we allowed liberal amounts of take-back-zies. It was not infrequent that we would make a move and then moments later say “Whoops, your piece can move like that, my move was dumb” and we would take the move back. Sometimes we would backtrack 3 or 4 moves because the error someone made was so glaring. We could easily do this recording the game in reversible long algebraic notation.

Wow! Duple-check and mate and 5 moves. We have yet to have a duple-check and mate in an actual game.

Actually I did witness two. By now I had Fairy-Max play many thousands of games, but of course I have been watching only a tiny fraction of that. Perhaps a hundred or so. Both duple-mates occurred in the end-game, though. Typical way for the Persians to finish off a defenseless opponent is to promote two Pawns to Queens, and checkmate with those. If the opponent at that point still has two Kings, duple-mate is sometimes the fastest way.

Two Kings can succesfully defend against a single Queen, btw: KQKK is draw when the Kings protect each other. In this respect the spare King is better than the Rook: in FIDE Chess KQKR is always won.

> Spartan Chess is different armies, of which there are examples only
> 1% or 2% of 4000 CVPage CVs. What about matching Spartan with instead
> of common F.i.d.e. army, the great Betza line-ups, Nutty Knights,
> Colourbound Clobberers, Remarkable Rookies?

This would be interesting, as testing all of the CDA armies would be interesting. With the latest release of WinBoard, I had promoted CDA (in particlar FIDE vs. Clobberers) to the standard choice in the variant that WinBoard knows as 'fairy', and implemented Fairy-Max to play it. (I had to extend Fary-Max' castling code for this, because of the non-standard castling done by the Clobberers, and Adapt WinBoard to allow castling with any corner piece, not just Rooks). Next release of Fairy-Max can switch the variant presented as 'fairy' at run time, and will use this to add some more cases of CDA. (All combinations of Nutty Knights, Color-bound Clobberers and FIDE.)

The Clobberers raise some interesting fundamental questions in the area of piece values, about pair bonuses. The Nutty Knights are not particularly interesting, and to my taste a quite irregular and awkward bunch (too much forwardness, to little retreating capacity). The Remarkable Rookies cannot yet be implemented in Fairy-Max, as it does not support the concept of restricted sliders like the Short Rook. I never looked at the other armies you mention.

IMO Spartan Chess is much more than just another CDA army. The dual Kings give it a very nice twst, and equiping both sides with different Pawn types gives the game a quite different and refreshing 'feel'. Furthermore, the high regularity of its pieces appeals to my sense for symmetry.

This is the first of four parts on Spartan Chess:
   1. Spartan Chess – The Dream
   2. What makes Spartan Chess Different? 
      - Waiting for the other Shoe to Drop
   3. Spartan Chess – The Process
   4. Spartan Chess - The Business
   --------------------------------------------------------------

SPARTAN CHESS – THE DREAM

Some people count sheep to get to sleep... 

Having played tournament chess when I was in college, back when Bobby Fisher was winning a World Championship, a few years ago I started thinking about creating a chess variant. The variant needed to have two completely different sides with different strategies while still being fun and balanced. Must already have been done I thought as I poked around the internet and “Zounds!” found the Chess Variants web site. Yahoo!

There was the very fine Chess with Different Armies and others but not too terribly many such variants. And I found none at all that featured the pawns on one side moving differently from the pawns on the other. My conclusions were that making a play-balanced chess variant with different armies was difficult and that putting different types of pawns on both sides was perhaps impossible. Otherwise someone would have already done it.

What to do, what to do? I would go to bed, think of chess, and would soon be asleep dreaming of chess pieces and chess variants. I dreamt of pieces called legionnaires, bodyguards, berserkers and the pawns, always different types of pawns, what to do about the pawns? The sleep was good but progress was slow. 

After having watched the highly entertaining although grossly ahistorical movie “300” and the Military Channel’s “Thermopylae, the Real Story of 300” I awoke one morning. A voice whispered to me “Two Kings. The Spartans had two Kings!' 'Would that even work; chess with two Kings on one side?” I asked myself. Well it would certainly be unusual, maybe even unique. Chess with different pieces, different pawns, two Kings on one side? After at least five years of dreaming it suddenly had become just too appealing to me. I had to try it.

After some design, some research, several rules reworks and a lick of play testing a version of Spartan Chess was created that was playable. The dream was over and the period of rational analysis was well underway. 

Spartan Chess has been the stuff of dreams, a small labor of love, and it’s been fun. Hope its fun for you too.

I am retired now and have the time for this sort of thing and I’m still not counting sheep to get to sleep.

This is the second of four parts on Spartan Chess:
   1. Spartan Chess – The Dream
   2. What makes Spartan Chess Different? 
      - Waiting for the other Shoe to Drop
   3. Spartan Chess – The Process
   4. Spartan Chess - The Business

   --------------------------------------------------------------

WHAT MAKES SPARTAN CHESS DIFFERENT?
    - Waiting for the other Shoe to Drop

There are several unusual features of Spartan Chess and a couple that are (maybe) unique.

1. Unusual – Different Armies
Spartan chess pits two completely different chess armies against each other. With the exception of their Kings, every Spartan piece differently than that of the Persians (FIDA). While this is by no means unique, only a percentage point or two of chess variants vary the chess pieces between sides.

2. Unusual – Historical Rationale
There is a historical rationale for the opposing sides; Spartans vs. Persians. While the origin of Chess is debated (did it originate in India or Persia?) I naturally accepted the FIDA army as the Persians. While designing the Spartans I tried to capture the flavor of a more slowly moving, solid, mainly foot-soldier army. Of the chess variants with different armies only a fraction of those try to represent historical armies. A historical rationale is an unusual feature, not a unique one.

3. Unique – Spartan Hoplites or Spartan pawns
Spartan Chess features pawns on the two sides with different capabilities. The Persian uses traditional pawns of course. The Spartan uses hoplites in place of pawns and move differently than pawns. The use of different types of pawns on opposing sides is, it seems, unique.

4. Unique – Two Kings
In Spartan Chess the Spartans field a chess army with two Kings. This is a part of the historical rationale owing to the fact that the Spartans did, in fact, have two Kings. Placing two fully royal Kings on one side along with rules to make that work, including situational check immunity and duple-check, is a unique feature of Spartan Chess.

Waiting for the other Shoe to Drop
Everything around chess has already been done before, hasn’t it? Over the years, as I thought about chess pieces and game variants, I would come up with an idea. I would then visit the various wikis and the CV website and find that it had already been done (*sigh*). Not so with different pawns on different sides. “Why?” I thought, “Was it just too hard?” I stuck with this idea until I came up with the additional idea of the Spartan army and two Kings and then developed this chess variant. There is still, a part of me that is waiting for someone to step forward and say something like “Well, this has all been done before. See my web link to Mr. T. H. Chesserman’s game Lacemedonian (i.e. Spartan) Chess invented in 1884”. So I sit, “Waiting for the other shoe to drop”.

This is the third of four parts on Spartan Chess:
   1. Spartan Chess – The Dream
   2. What makes Spartan Chess Different? 
      - Waiting for the other Shoe to Drop
   3. Spartan Chess – The Process
   4. Spartan Chess - The Business

   --------------------------------------------------------------

SPARTAN CHESS – THE PROCESS

I thought about a chess variant for some time and there were a number of considerations I had in mind. These included: 1) historical rationale, 2) asymmetry, 3) different pieces on both sides, 4) different pawns on both sides, 5) play balance, and 6) fun. When I arrived at the overall idea for Spartan Chess I added one additional consideration and that was 7) two Kings one side.

1) Historical Rationale
Spartans vs. Persians is really all that needs to be said about the historical rationale. 

2) Asymmetry
In orthodox chess you can make a lot of equal trades. You can trade a Knight for a Knight or a Rook for a Rook for example. By design, every time you make a trade in Spartan Chess you have to consider how you are shifting the balance of power since there are no “equal trades”. From the start the “power hierarchy” of the pieces was created to enforce asymmetry. These piece values are still being worked on but rough values for the pieces in Spartan Chess are:

Queen		9
Warlord	        8
General	        7
Rook		5
King		5-  (the extra Spartan King)
Bishop	        3+  (plus 1/2 point pair bonus)
Lieutenant	3+
Knight		3
Colonel	        3+-

Just after winning a game as the Persians one play tester commented something like, “This is irritating. I never knew where I stood, what trades to make. Things just aren’t equal. I think this is a problem.” I said “Yeah, that is a good point” while thinking to myself “He just won a hard fought game and is grumbling about the asymmetry. Mission accomplished!”

3) Different pieces on both sides
First there was the consideration of what army to use for the Persians? It’s already done, the FIDA army is the Persians. The Persians had highly mobile fast moving army with such pieces as their chariots and elephants (rooks and bishops) and is quite regular and beautiful. I suppose that you might expect this after more than 500 years of development and play test :)

For the Spartans I thought about achieving two goals; asymmetry and what I call “Spartaness”. 

In my early designs I used the Chancellor and Archbishop from Capablanca chess on the Spartan side as the Warlord and General. Thus the Persians had the most powerful piece, the Queen. The next two most powerful pieces were the Warlord and General. The next 2 most powerful pieces were the Rooks. Asymmetry was well underway. 

Next the Captain and Lieutenant were created as pieces to fight very well with their hoplites. They were slow moving, supportive and capable. So with two Spartan Kings, hoplites in place of pawns, and the minor pieces the Captain and Lieutenant I felt I had a good degree of Spartaness on the black side. 

4) Different pawns on both sides
The Spartan have hoplites in place of pawns. Hoplites are a form of berolina pawns that differ in that they can jump, not just slide, two squares on their first move. Six different configurations for pawns were tried before settling on the modified berolina pawn. The first was a hoplite that moved like a pawn and captured like a checker. That was quickly discarded. Getting the hoplite “right” took the most work.

7) Two Kings one side
The Spartans have two Kings and their second King, based on testing, is nearly as valuable as a Rook.

What makes the two Kings work is their situational check immunity, duple-check and duple-mate. These rules just naturally evolved as we realized that the rules being play tested just were not good enough. We tried total check immunity when the Spartans had 2 kings and we tried no check immunity at all. The first was somewhat OK and the second a complete disaster for the Spartans. 

The first game where we tried duple-check (if both Spartan Kings are under attack one must escape attack on the next move) there was very entertaining and dynamic game. The Spartans had 2 Kings, some hoplites and their two Captains marching across the center of the board. With no duple-check rule there was nothing to stop them on their slow path to promoting their hoplites. With duple-check the Persians were able to zip around both flanks and rear of the Spartans delivering duple-check after duple check eventually out maneuvering the Spartans and winning a still close fought the game. Further play tests proved the duple-check rules good ones. And this game seemed to underscore the historical point that if the Spartans let the Persian outmaneuver them then the Spartans should loose.

5) Play Balance
We kept tweaking the rules play test after play test until we achieved at what we felt was play balance. The rules we arrived at were exactly the same as we final version except that the General moved like a Chancellor rather than a Crowned Rook. 

Fortunately Mr. H.G. Muller entered the picture and modified his Fairy-Max to be able to play Spartan Chess. We soon discovered from running hundreds of computer vs. computer matches that Spartan Chess favored the Spartans 2:1. 

Both Mr. Muller and I altered the major Spartan pieces, the General and Warlord in attempts to achieve balance. He tried them both as crowned and I tried making one or the other a Bishop + Dababa or a Rook + Afil and so on. Coincidentally we both tried the General as a Crowned Rook and the Warlord as an Archbishop and as if by magic equality was achieved. The last 100 games I ran with this configuration yielded this result: 39 Persian wins/40 Spartan wins/ 21 Draws. Mr. Muller had similar results.

I shed a few tears over electing to make the General a crowned Rook rather than a Chancellor but play balance is THE BOSS. I bowed to him.

6) Fun
I have had fun creating and the play testers have had fun playing Spartan Chess. I hope you have some fun too.

**Interesting factoid from my research**
Did you know that the commander of the Kings 300 man bodyguard was given a rank that indicated he commanded a cavalry unit?

'Waiting for the other shoe to drop' - sometimes that can take a while, but if nothing has popped up by now, whatever might be lurking is not obvious. 

Jeremy Good expressed the wish for totally different armies, including pawns, in our conversations on shatranj-style armies, where he wanted for a long time to dump the knight from the shatranj CwDA. And someone has tried Chess with Different Pawns, but I cannot remember where.

A number of games have multiple royal pieces, but there are very few with different numbers on different sides in the same game. And I don't believe any of those are pure chess variants.

Steven, if nothing shows in the next few days, you get to sit and wait for months or years before anything may show up. And even then... but for now, you're probably good. ;-) 

You'd be surprised at both how many times people design the same game, or effectively the same game, and also at how many great, obvious after the fact, games there are constantly being posted. A number of people have expressed amazement that no one has done their game before. And others have been amazed that someone else did 'their' game, sometimes long before. Heh, Larry Smith floored me with a comment on VR Parton's Sphinx Chess when I posted my first variant, Hyperchess. Gary Gifford posted effectively the same game right after Jeremy Good posted a very slightly different version. And these things will happen more as the world gets more interconnected - it's the price of progress. The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away.

This is the fourth of four parts on Spartan Chess:
  1. Spartan Chess – The Dream
  2. Spartan Chess - The Difference
      (Waiting for the other Shoe to Drop)
  3. Spartan Chess – The Process
  4. Spartan Chess - The Business

  --------------------------------------------------------------

SPARTAN CHESS – THE BUSINESS

My Business Background
I have been around business a bit. You my read about my background in my profile should you wish: http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displayperson.php?personid=streetmansd 

When I introduced version 1.08 of Spartan Chess to my circle of gaming friends we played a few very fun games. I was soon asked the question, “Do you plan on marketing this invention?” 

I answered something like this: I have seen they type of thing done before. Some chess variants I know have been marketed. Omega Chess looks like a modest success. Gothic Chess, which I followed for years, appears to have fared poorly. The large tournaments that were conceived of did not materialize. Their web site contains many broken links and their Blog page peeked in activity a couple of years ago; both usually a bad sign. And the game King’s Battlefield appears to have been a complete disaster. There were marketing tag lines, testimonials, mouse pads, coffee cups, and bumper stickers; a full promotional effort that just needed a market.

The market for chess variants is small, maybe a few hundred people. Americans don’t play much chess and far fewer play chess variants. So, my marketing analysis is this: I could invest between $20,000 and $40,000 into a serious business effort and make, based on my observations and analysis, upwards of $300. So no, I do not plan on marketing Spartan Chess. I have done this, like most chess variant inventors, just for fun. 

Synopsis…
Marketing a product to such a small potential customer base is at least tough business if not a suicidal business proposition. 

I would like to hear about any marketing experiences, both those contradicting and those confirming, this terse business analysis.

With regard to the business side of variant chess.  Yes, the actual market for chess variants is currently very small, but no, the potential market is very large.  Hundreds of millions of people play chess and are very enthusiastic about the game and I am sure a good percentage of these players would find preferred games amongst variant chess; unfortunately most (virtually all?) are not aware of alternative variant games and this, I think, is what is holding back progress. How to solve this problem I do not know, but I think it is necessary to gain the attention of large numbers of players - If, for example, the next edition of the largest selling chess software, Chessmaster, were to include a few good variants properly programmed then this might start some momentum.  There are other possibilities but they would require the interest of the right person(s) and this is very difficult to bring about.

G. Nicholls

To H.G. Muller - Do you know roughly how many people have installed XBoard, WinBoard or Fairy-Max?

G. Nicholls

Not really. I have set up a thread in the WinBoard Forum for distributing the WinBoard binary, and we can see how many views that thread has. Since version 4.4.0 came out, that thread has had 43,795 views. But of course not everyone that views the thread comes there to actually download. And there have been several version releases (we are now at 4.4.4 there), so people that do get there to download,might have been there several times, once for each version.

For Linux I know even less, because we don't do the distribution ourselves there.I know that Debian keeps track of how many downloads there are from their repositories, for each package, on a week by week basis. But I am not sure if this includes Ubuntu downloads, as Ubuntu has its own repositories. And I have no idea which version people download; version 4.2.7, which had almost no variant support, is still widely used.

Of course there are many other Linux distros than Debian/Ubuntu.

An excellent to this game!

Maybe the author has not read the comment below, otherwise he would have been frightened by the task he has underdone. On the other hand: Can a Spartan be frightened?

http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/chess-different-pawns.html

--JKn

I'd say Steven hit a home run, even if he didn't hit this one clear out of the park. Let me quote the last 2 lines of the Betza article Jorg refers to, Different Pawns.

'If you can find alternate Pawns, I will be in awe, taking my hat off to you.

And, to keep you from feeling complacent, I'll ask you to try chess with different Kings. I now fade away, leaving nothing behind but an evil grin.'

Spartan chess, with its pair of kings, is halfway between FIDE and Gary Gifford's Three Elephant Chess. http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSthreeelephantc You may argue the kings aren't quite different enough to fulfill Ralph's requirements. Still, Steven nailed the different pawns and also managed to put 3 kings on the board in the same 2-player game. That's a nice, high benchmark for the rest of us to go after.

Joe Joyce wrote in this thread:

> Jeremy Good expressed the wish for totally different armies, including 
> pawns, in our conversations on shatranj-style armies, where he wanted 
> for a long time to dump the knight from the shatranj CwDA. And someone
> has tried Chess with Different Pawns, but I cannot remember where.

In fact, there is an old experimental army for Chess with different armies, namely Ralph Betza's Jovian army, see

   http://www.chessvariants.org/d.betza/chessvar/cvda/wow-jup.html

This army may be an interesting opponent to the Spartans.

Thanks Jorge for pointing me to the page with the discussion of chess with different pawns. This article has gotten me to thinking about the play balance dynamics of Spartan Chess.

Spartan Chess uses a slightly modified version of a berolina pawn for the hoplites which do get stronger as the game goes on and as the board clears; just what the article points out. Spartan Chess stays balanced because as the hoplites get stronger the Persian pieces also get stronger than the Spartan pieces, on average. Their bishops and rooks are definitely stronger as the board clears and they can exercise their full power on long clear diagonals and files. 

I would share the complex calculus and ground-breaking mathematical calculations that went into balancing the game given these two off-setting dynamics but I cannot since there is none. 

But seriously, having read the article and having time to reflect on the asymmetric play-balance dynamics of Spartan Chess I am delightfully surprised that it has worked out.

I have made an actual set based off graphics Steven Streetman created. Each
army has different graphics.

The Spartans are round the Persians square, a suggestion I made to the game
creator to further create the idea of different armies,

I believe Steven plans to upload some photos I sent him.

Wish other creators had graphics which could be printed in a descent size.

The pieces I made are wood, about 1 1/4 inches round/square.

The pawns/hoplites are 1/2 inch thick, the other pieces 3/4 inches.