Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Alfaerie is one of the six preconfigured settings in the design wizard for the interactive diagram, (setting the right values for the image directory, square size, white/black prefix and graphics type at the press of a button), and in fact the default choice. Other buttons give you Abstract, Motif, Utrecht, 2 sizes XBoard presets. And of course you could use your own uploaded graphics, by supplying the location and other parameters to the design wizard explicitly.

For the pieces I needed Alfaerie was not too bad. I had to improvise a bit for the (Mounted) Veteran, using the Wazir(-Knight) instead, thus only indicating the non-capture move correctly. But that seemed acceptible.

Some of the other Alfaerie pieces look embarrasingly simplistic (e.g. Elephant), so I usually prefer the XBoard theme when I need any of those. Even the orthodox pieces look pretty ugly in Alfaerie; they are not anti-aliased, giving them a very ragged appearance. This is so 20th-century... I think it is high time someone would take the trouble replacing all the Alfaerie image files by anti-aliased versions (with alpha channel).

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BTW, I am happy you like Veteran Chess. I have not programmed it into any engine yet, but I play-tested it against a regular participant of the Dutch Superchess championship over the board, and it seemed quite playable. That 1:1 trading is discouraged by leaving the opponent with a promoted piece seems compensated well enough by that in 2:1 trading you can promote your second piece to compensate for the loss of the first. E.g. a Pawn protected by a Pawn is pretty much unassailable in orthodox Chess, but here after BxP, PxP, NxP=M promoting the Knight to a Rook-class piece plus capture of two Pawns seems enough compensation for the Bishop. So you don't get into stand-off situations too easily.

I think this variant has a design flaw. In orthodox Chess a Pawn protected by a Pawn is basically unassailable for any piece, except that Pawns can still successfully capture it (i.e. without losing material). But here that is no longer true: capturing a P protected by a P makes the latter promote in the recapture. This makes it too difficult to break down Pawn chains.

Maka Dai Dai Shogi, from which the promotion-on-capture rules were borrowed does not have this problem: the Pawns there are Shogi Pawns, rigorously bound to their file, so that Pawns can never protect each other. With FIDE Pawns the rule do not work so well, though.

One way to repair this would be to replace the FIDE Pawns with Shogi Pawns. This violates the spirit of the design, however, which was to use promotion-on-capture in a FIDE context.

An alternative would be to make PxP a special case, in which no promotion can take place. Other pieces capturing a P could still promote, as could a P capturing another piece.

An alternative would be to make PxP a special case, in which no promotion can take place. Other pieces capturing a P could still promote, as could a P capturing another piece.

I tried modifying ChessV to play with this alteration and the results definitely look better. Before, the players would glob up in the center but both sides would try hard not to capture anything. This version still seems to have some significant moving about before captures start, but then play looks pretty normal. (I haven't studied the games in any detail.)

Here's a typical ChessV self-play game with the new restriction. Game runs for 84 moves before white mates. The first capture is on move 18.

You can download as a ChessV saved game file here. The include file to make ChessV play with these rules is here.

I changed the rules as described in the article now such that PxP does not provide a promotion opportunity. I also considered smaller rule modifications, such as that this would only hold in the move immediately after PxP, or only on P x promoted P, but I decided the added complexity (having an e.p.-rights-like extra game state, or distinguishing two different kinds of Veterans) was not worth it. The new rule creates a difference from Maka Dai Dai Shogi when a Pawn captures an unprotected Pawn, where it can now not promote. Just the reverse of the old problem, where a Pawn that recaptured after PxP could promote in Veteran Chess, while such a recapture would never be possible in Maka Dai Dai Shogi in the first place. The new rules do not discourage attacking Pawn chains, however.

I also made a second rule change: the Lady is now also contageous, and pieces capturing it mandatorily promote to Queen. With a non-contageous Lady I felt it was too easy to avoid Queens appearing at all by early indirect trading of the Ladies. In addition it makes the Lady a more powerful attacking piece: when kept sufficiently protected it can now safely be exposed to attacks by even less valuable pieces, as the exchange would result in a Queen. So it can be used in the vanguard.

The Interactive Diagram now also implements these rule changes, and I made some improvements to the general diagram script that makes optional deferral also possible with custom-defined promotions. (The previous implementation would automatically defer on demotions, and mandatorily promote otherwise.)