Ratings & Comments

If you have Telegram, I invite you to my channel themed on chess variants: https://t.me/DeepVariantExplorers

Testing an interactive diagram (huge thanks to HaruN Y for doing most of the work on a Sphinx Chess diagram):

The first problem to solve is that the square coloring doesn't alternate properly. If there's a way to set colors more manually, I'll do that. I think the coloring is important to see the bishop bindings and rook's alternation, so I'm not willing to just leave it as is. I can't put just one hole between little boards, or the knights will be afforded an incorrect move. I could put three holes between little boards, but that'll have quite a bit too much empty space (can you thin specific ranks+columns?).

Other known issues: Ideally I could override the coordinates, but if not it'll be fine, I just won't use it as the main setup diagram. The knight is still a Centauri, none of the pieces have their triagonal or quadragonal components yet, and obviously the layout isn't set yet; I expect I can fix those once the layout is settled.

If I can fix up those issues (and any others that arise), I'll include it on the page, along with a separate game (maybe this should be a separate page) that features the raw orthogonal/diagonal/triagonal/quadragonal sliders, just to help demonstrate.

Yours still seems to overprescribe movements (but this has been wonderful as a start to more-symmetric 4d games like my own TessChess, for which I'm dabbling with expanding your diagram here). Here's my attempt. Let me know if you have questions about the rules, or if I seem to have Betza'ed incorrectly (likely).

The author, Gerd Degens, has updated this page.

Oh, I see.

I thought there would be no AYY because I thought "they change either the letter or number (but not both)" meant no moving diagonally between the boards & somehow I missed that moving diagonally doesn't change the number.

The author, HaruN Y, has updated this page.

The author, HaruN Y, has updated this page.

Fuller's Proposal1320

If black has 1 Persian King and 1 Spartan King, is there duple-check for them?

The editor A. M. DeWitt has revised this page.

The author, A. M. DeWitt, has updated this page.

@HGMuller

The first problem to solve is that the square coloring doesn't alternate properly. If there's a way to set colors more manually, I'll do that. I think the coloring is important to see the bishop bindings and rook's alternation, so I'm not willing to just leave it as is. I can't put just one hole between little boards, or the knights will be afforded an incorrect move. I could put three holes between little boards, but that'll have quite a bit too much empty space (can you thin specific ranks+columns?).

Skimming the documentation page for the interactive diagram, I think I can do this, but just by creating a background image and setting the background parameter (keeping two spaces between boards)? That's a little obnoxious, and something like Game Courier's method for specifying custom coloring patterns would be nice, but also not a big deal.

Ideally I could override the coordinates

This doesn't seem possible besides setting a starting rank number, but I can suppress coordinates altogether. A new parameter with comma-separated rank/file names would be really nice.

New month started………

You can embed a JavaScript function xxxShade(x,y) on the page, which returns a color (like '#ffc080'). (Where xxx is the value of the satellite parameter.) Which will then be used for the square with internal coordinates (x,y). (Where the lower-left corner is (0,0).)

The problem with coordinates is that these are not just for dressing up the image, but are used in notation. By allowing arbitrary coordinate labels it would be possible to define coordinates for which SAN can no longer be unambiguously parsed.

Army of tencubed

Random Army of tencubed

I second Atomic Chess.

@H. G. Muller,

I am making a new chess variant, Reiwa Dai Shogi, that is basically Dai Shogi with better piece balancing, replacing the weak pieces with stronger ones with stronger promotions.

However, I am struggling to make a good power piece for the game. Ideally, I want something that is stronger than the Lion but still has difficulty mating.

I figured it would be a good idea to have you weigh in on this, since you know a fair deal about Chu Shogi and the historical variants.

Here's a diagram of my first in-dev version. Lion is currently subject to trading rules due to lack of a stronger power piece ATM. The only new pieces are the Ram's-Head Soldiers on c1 and m1.

Francois,

Sorry for not responding to your email with the chess icons earlier. It was in my spam folder.

These images are really good. Seriously, great work with your SVGs.

I did find one flaw in your mnemonic SVGs though. The ranging pieces don't have the radial lines where their ranging bulges are, which isn't a huge deal, but can cause confusion if you are used to H. G. Muller's mnemonic system for Shogi pieces. This problem is much more pronounced with the bfree-tiger and heavenly-horse SVGs though, where no white lines will show up at all, making the piece just look like one big mass of black. My guess is that the program you are using couldn't perceive the white lines due to them being at a pixel wide or less.

I used Tinkercad (https://www.tinkercad.com/) to create my Chu Shogi SVGs. Tinkercad is a free online 3D tool that has an Export to SVG tool which works on all Shapes intersecting the Design Plane. It can be a bit tedious when you need to make a lot of SVGs but can save a lot of time and result in high quality SVGs.

Other than that, great work with these.