Check out Symmetric Chess, our featured variant for March, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Robert Price wrote on Tue, May 6, 2003 11:52 PM UTC:
Right, the 'illegal move' consists of picking up one of your pieces and moving it to any empty space, or using it to capture any enemey piece other than the King. All that extra verbage is just to prevent you from inventing a move that has the convenient side effect of slaying multiple enemy pieces (like the atomic bomb from Tank Chess, for example). <p> Anyway, it just occurred to me today what I found interesting about this variant when I wrote it up a year ago. The <a href=http://www.fide.com/official/handbook.asp>FIDE Handbook</a>, as a document that regulates tournament play, has a twofold job. First, it must describe the rules of the abstract game Chess with mathematical precision, so that for any board position that can possibly occur, it is unambiguously known what moves are available to the player. Secondly, it has to provide <i>procedures</i> to resolve disputes of a more 'human' and imprecise nature. <p> In particular, the handbook needs to say what to do if a piece is physically moved in a way that is not 'possible' in the abstract game (and is detected before the end of the game is declared). What I suddenly realized is that Cheapmate Chess came from modifying one of those <i>procedural</i> rules, and leaving all the abstract rules of Chess alone. In a perfect world, the procedures of chess playing would be completely separate from the abstract game. But it seems that this is a case in which they are inextricably related. No matter how precisely the rules are defined, the problem of <i>enforcing</i> them is still an imperfect matter of procedure. When I removed that last part of article 5.1a of <a href=http://www.fide.com/official/handbook.asp?level=EE101>Laws of Chess</a>, the problem of enforcement spilled into and altered the abstract game.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Cheapmate Chess

Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.