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

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Samuel Trenholme wrote on Fri, May 20, 2022 07:10 PM UTC in reply to Bn Em from 06:52 PM:

Since I didn’t make this clear: The opponent wouldn’t get to keep their extra move “in pocket”. When a summoning is done, the opponent then makes two moves immediately afterwards.

It’s true an extra move is very powerful, but having a replaceable piece which is only fully removed from the game when the summoner is captured is very powerful too. [1] If the two moves end up being too much compensation for the summoned piece, we can hobble that too (the extra move can not capture, one piece can not move twice, etc.)

I agree we need some playtesting to here to find out how much compensation we give the other player for the summoned piece getting placed on the board. It’s like changing the king’s move or how the pawns move: It changes the nature of the game enough that extensive playtesting is needed to see if it unbalances the game to the point it’s a forced win for the first player, or (especially if making the king too powerful) if it makes the game an easy draw.

This is also why I still like Zillions, some two decades after the program was last updated: Zillions is a relatively easy way to playtest game mechanics like this one.

[1] A game with summoning and drops can make the summoning less unbalanced too, since we can come up with some way of combining those mechanics to balance the summoning. Another option is to go the Seirawan route and only allow a summoning of a piece to be done precisely once.


Edit Form

Comment on the page ArchMage 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.