Ratings & Comments

A most interesting concept.

Woah, somehow you got it!!!

really one page instead of six is what I suggested much time ago. Well done!

Only flaw is that some pieces are linked to Piececlopedia while others aren’t.

I need a maorider+moarider compound, but I can't find the correct string. Can anyone help?

I am working on a Piece Lab where you can test pieces of your own design. It really helped me when I first made a local one for my own variants, so I thought I'd make one for the general Interactive Diagram-using public.

Ultima introduced a lot of novel mechanics for a chess game, some original and others from other games. To be honest, these novelties are a more valuable contribution to the Chess Variant world than the actual game in my opinion

If you actually play the game, it's clear that it can be quite flawed, in many cases due to overcomplications in the application of its rules. The inventor itself has even written an article about this.

Despite its flaws, it's clear that Ultima has something going for it, and I believe it was ultimately a net positive for the Chess Variant world.

I had Fairy-Stockfish play against itself with this, and White won. So perhaps it's not as good of an example as imagined. But I think that may have been influenced by Black not being able to Promote to Queen.

EDIT (Monday) The mating percentages I quoted were inflated by King captures, as H. G. Muller explained here an hour later. So I plan to be more careful when quoting statistics in the future. - David

Longest Checkmate Victory with K+N+(AD) vs K

in 35 moves on the 8x8 board (27.3%)

in 38 moves on the 12x8 board (18.6%)

in 38 moves on the 10x10 board (18.1%)

The Checkmating Applet on these Chess Variant Pages reveals that Knight and Courier (also known as an Alibaba = AD) are sometimes sufficient mating force. I am also intrigued by their ability to force stalemate victories in approximately 99% of random setups (see the information below). I have a couple of games here using stalemate victory, including Shatranj Kamil X on a 10x10 board. Byway has stated his belief that Modern Courier Chess permits a variety of minor piece checkmates, including the one using King, Knight and a pair of Couriers. The stalemating statistics suggest that this small army can easily trap a lone King in the nearest corner - the question remains, can they push the opposing King all the way to a corner which allows checkmate?

Longest Stalemate Victory with K+N+(AD) vs K

in 25 moves on the 8x8 board (98.9%)

in 35 moves on the 12x8 board (99.4%)

in 36 moves on the 10x10 board (99.5%)

Longest Stalemate Victory with K+N+(AmD) vs K

in 36 moves on the 8x8 board (98.8%)

in 55 moves on the 12x8 board (99.4%)

in 61 moves on the 10x10 board (99.4%)

The Checkmating Applet brings good news! My original creation, the (AmD) Elephant, can team up with a Knight to (eventually) stalemate a lone King. Pieces with four noncapturing moves are unusual in chess variants - the earliest examples I can recall are the Steward (quadra-pawn) in CENTENNIAL CHESS (1999) and the Bishop in Caïssa Britannia.

Knight and Ferz are another effective team, on the 8x8 board they can stalemate almost as quickly as the Knight and Bishop can checkmate. I was aware that a pair of Knights could force stalemate, but it is nice to have it verified.

Longest Stalemate Victory with K+N+F vs K

in 35 moves on the 8x8 board (94.4%)

in 55 moves on the 12x8 board (92.9%)

in 61 moves on the 10x10 board (93.6%)

Longest Stalemate Victory with K+N+N vs K

in 26 moves on the 8x8 board (99.5%)

in 37 moves on the 12x8 board (99.7%)

in 38 moves on the 10x10 board (99.7%)

Wiibid

But with shuffle.

The poll was on a Discord server.

I’ve recently seen a YouTube video with game between Levy Rozman (aka GothamChess) without his Knights VS Hikaru Nakamura with 7 Knights. Hikaru won, but it’s partially because he played by White and Levy blundered his Bishop on 4th move.

Maybe Bishops’ pair & 2 Rooks are better than 2 Queens.

OK, I see. This seems more about an issue how a mime piece that can be selected from a menu in a particular piece of software should behave to be most generally useful than a discussion about chess-variant design. In such configurable software the solution I discussed with Aurelian seems more flexible (and in fact upward compatible) than any of the options in the poll: allow the user to define an arbitrary mapping similar to the capture matrix between moved piece and what the mime should move as. The promoChoice strings could contain a newly defined special symbol to indicate "as the last-moved piece can promote". This decouples move mimicking from promotion mimicking.

Also note that the black King should play an active role; it should not be afraid to move to the centre, together with the pack of Knights. If the engine would use the standard king-safety evaluation, which strongly encourages it to cower away in a corner, and then keep a number of Knights there, and the best black can hope for is a draw. Instead black should go for the enemy King, and force the Queens to sacrifice themselves for a single Knight in order to pervent being checkmated.

Note that King + Bishop are not able to force stalemate, but that giving the Bishop a single extra non-capturing orthogonal step is already sufficient to genreally achieve this.

Please help. Where to write morphing, after which line and with which symbols, after or before, I should embed it? https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Different+Pawns+Random+Chess&settings=diffpawnrandom-coded&submit=Edit