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Comments by BenGood
Thanks, but i have an omegachess set. we're looking for something considerably nicer than the omegachess board, which is made out of cardboard and has a cut halfway through so that it can fold into quarters. it would not do the exchess pieces justice.
btw, i am also aware that the commercial variant 'roman chess' comes with a vinyl 10x10 board. it looks pretty nice, but the set is also $70, which seems rather high, especially considering that the design of the additional piece is one of the most uncreative pieces i've ever seen. <P>
sorry, looks like we have gotten into a discussion here that's become completely unrelated to the page we're actually posting it to.
Alfaerie Expansion Set 3. More chess variant graphics based on the Alpha chess font.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]looks good. but am i missing something or is there no link to click on for actually downloading the expansion.zip?
Shogi 
. Optimized ZRFs for Japanese Chess and some recent variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]very nice, but i need to point out that if you go to the 'traditional board' variant, the pieces are setup shifted one square to the left, which means the leftmost column is off the board and just sort of floating in space, and the rightmost column is empty. fortunately the 'modern' and 'large' boards work fine, and the different piece sets are very nice.
Photo's of Shogi Set. Photo's of wooden Shogi (Japanese chess) set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]hans, the page just says that the set is from japan? did you order it or were you actually there? if you ordered it, where'd you order it from? how much did it cost?
Shogi set photo's. Photo's of shogi (Japanese chess) set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]nice sharp photos on this one - i wish my pics came out that good. it would be nice tho if the author could provide some info on where he got the set and how much it cost. <P>
also, the other posted comment is totally irrelevant to what's actually on the page and probably should be removed.
ps - it would also be helpful if the make and model of digital camera used was listed on the page somewhere. thanks.
Korean Chess: photo's (2). Photo's of original Korean chess set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]some nice closeup pics here. i'd like to point out tho that the link no longer works, and neither does www.ekoreanmart.com.
something else i forgot to mention - when you click on the third thumbnail, the pic on the resulting webpage is actually *smaller* than the original thumbnail. this is definitely not right.
Hexagonal Chess Set. Home made set of Glinski's Hexagonal Chess.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]nice pic, and nice set. i'd be interested in hearing exactly how the board was made.
Piececlopeida: Advancer. 
Moves like a Queen, but captures by approach.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]doh. thanks, i've sent aronson a corrected diagram.
Multivariant Tournament 2003. 2003 Multivariant PBEM tournament headquarters page.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]number of squares is can be a really misleading stat when considering the 'size' of a game - in this case how long it will take to play (realizing of course that there's always a big range for any given game). a more important number is the how many pieces are in the game. for example, chess and xiangqi both start with 32 pieces and both take approximately the same amount of time to play, xiangqi should definitely not be considered a 'large' variant. and if you look at omegachess, it adds 40 squares to the board but just 4 non-pawn pieces. the starting setup can be a factor too, i find omegachess games are generally slightly longer than grandchess because the extra squares are between the armies - not behind them as in grandchess, and the new pieces are leapers instead of riders. i've found a lot of 10x8 and 10x10 games are closer in playing time to chess than to truly large variants such as doublechess, quantum, rennchess, and chushogi.
i was planning on voting against shogi and xiangqi for this tourney for the same reason that mhowe objects to gothic and omega - they are games for which one can fairly easily find an online opponent; dshort runs an omega tourney on richard's pbem server about once a year - there is one currently going. i also saw this tourney as an opportunity to play some more unusual games that rarely get played. <P>
i also vote no for machines. i get enough of zillions too. the quirks of zillions thinking process are wellknown and can often be used against it, so i am interested in seeing how people play these games. if programmers are really interested in trying out their programs, i'd suggest running a separate tourney for that.
Extinction chess. Win by making your opponents pieces of one type extinct. (8x8, Cells: 64) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Shogi. Missing description (9x9, Cells: 81) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]On the side bar there is a link called 'links to shogi variants.' this link no longer works, i get a message saying this index has moved and it's redirecting me automatically, but then it just takes me to the main index.
Chu Shogi
. Members-Only Shogi variant on 12 by 12 board. (Link.).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Dai Shogi. Shogi variant on 15 by 15 board. (Link.).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]aha. lawson pointed out a typo in the url for this page, but nobody ever fixed it. roger hare's page is still up. i would assume then that there is a similar typo in the chushogi page.
Building a Tridimensional Chess Board. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]re: lippincott's comments: i'm definitely interested in seeing pics of this. chessvariants.com has its own photo section, if you go to the main index the link for the photo index is towards the bottom. you can contact on of the editors about what to do with your pics. btw, i assume all your dimensions are really in inches, not in feet as you indicated.
ok, i'll have to come back and read more carefully later, but one thing i noticed is something to the effect that wider boards help increase the value of diagonal movers more than orthogonal movers. i have had no experience that would even remoately back up such a claim. in david short's doublechess, a game in which the board is 16x8, the bishop is severely weakened by the width of the board. it's well-known that increasing the board size weakens the knight, but in doublechess the B is hurt almost as much as the N by the board change (comparing to 8x8). the fact that it is more likely to attack the opponent's camp in 2 directions rather than 1 is small compensation for the fact that it often takes 10 moves or move to get the bishop from side of the board to the other. the rook, on the other hand, is not affected at all. in fact, when studying the relative values of pieces on different sized boards, it is my claim that all other things being equal, the rook is the most consistent piece from board to board, and should be the baseline against which other pieces are measured.
Flamingo. (1,6)-jumper.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]it's (1,6), if you follow the link to torsten linss' problem page, you can see that's how he's moving it in his problems. i'm not sure what i was thinking when i made the page - a lot of the pages i submitted in 1998 and early 99 were written very quickly, there's not much to them and they have some errors (there's also an inconsistency in the antelope in terms of how it's described on the page and how it's described in the index). i have been working on redoing all my piececlopedia pages, but it will be awhile before i get to some of them.
hmmm... my original response on this seems to have never gone thru... <P>
the flamingo is a (1,6) leaper. if you follow the link to torsten linss' problems, you'll see that's how he's using it. i'm not sure what i was thinking when i made the diagram, the piece pages i submitted in 1998 and early 99 were generally written very quickly and a lot of them didn't have much to them. i am working on redoing all my piece pages but it will be awhile before i get to all of them. i know with the antelope that there's a discrepancy between how it's described in the page and how's it's described in the index.
Treyshah. A commercial three-player hexagonal variant with 23 pieces a side. (Cells: 210) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]this is an interesting board and starting setup. is he still selling boards or are they all gone? did he sell pieces too or did you have to provide your own? i notice that besides needing 3 different colors and 3 bishops per sdie, each side also needs 14 pawns. i also notice that the knight is not really analagous to the orthogonal chess knight like in the glinski and mccooey games - it's really the hexagonal version of the zebra, and altho i haven't played the game yet, it's probably a very awkward and weak piece, i'm rather skeptical of the claim that the knight and bishop in this game are worth about the same amount.
well, besides multi-movers, leaping pieces such as grasshoppers have symmetric move patterns but assymetric retreat. and xiangqi cannon has assymetric retreat when capturing but not when moving, which is one of the things that makes it such a neat piece (and difficult to get used to).<P> and incidentally any piece that move differently forwards than backwards (these pieces don't have symmetric move patterns, at least not about the x-axis) is going to have assymetric retreat. this includes lots of betza pieces such as fBbR, fRbB, etc etc (i could go on and on) and shogi pieces (which can of course be easily described in betza notation) such as the gold, silver, copper generals, the white horse and the whale, etc etc.
Raumschach: the Thoroddsen board. Build your own 3d chessboard.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]this is a neat design, and it gives some good ideas for making 3D boards in general. but it's too bad there's no photographs of the board, i wonder if the author can get access to a digital camera or take some pics and have them scanned. i would like to see it.
Index page of The Chess Variant Pages. Our main index page.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]it's a mystery to me why you can't link to a page just because its url is long.
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