Comments by ChessShogi

The main reason I gave the name "Decimal Chess" to this variant  because I did not find any Chess variant that went by that name. I  wanted to avoid stealing the name of another game and including any part of my name when naming the game. I wanted to give the game a name that referenced the size of the board, but I couldn't a good alternative. I will put a note on the page to avoid confusion until I decide on an alternative.

When I designed Yangsi, I did so with the principles in Fergus Duniho's On Designing Good Chess Variants in mind. I have actually playtested this game several times. The people I played the game with all thought it was fun and very playable. I remember one particularly enjoyable game I played where I had a bare King and my opponent had a king and two pawns. That game ended in a draw via stalemate.

The name has been finalized (finally!). Many thanks to H. G. Muller for suggesting the name.

Increasing the board size does give the pieces more freedom of movement, Mr. Duniho, but it also does another thing - it makes it harder to keep track of everything. You yourself have stated this in your article "On Designing Good Chess Variants" in the section "Don't make your game too small or too large."

"Small games can finish too quickly, and large games can last too long. Note that the three classics are on moderate sized boards, ranging in size from 8x8 for Chess to 9x10 for Xiang Qi. 10x10 has proven a good size for many games, though 12x12 and up might be too large. I have recently (November 2009) created a 12x12 variant called Gross Chess. To some extent, this is an experiment with a board of this size. The only pieces it adds have been tried and tested in other variants, which allows the game to be a test mainly of the increased board size. Games against Zillions of Games suggest that the game is enjoyable but the larger size makes it harder to keep track of everything. I haven't yet won a game against Zillions without taking back moves. I have played a couple games on Game Courier, drawing one game and losing the other."

As for your comments on piece density, I don't think that cramming the pieces together within a 10x10 space will create too many problems. Kevin Pacey's Sac Chess also has a piece density of 60% at the start of the game, and is one of the top 50 games on Game Courier.

Note to editors: The site name for this page is incorrect. It should be https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/futashikana-shogi instead of https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dacimal-chess. As this page hasn't been approved yet, the change can be made without any trouble.

I would love to be a part of this event. My favorite variants that are currently on the list are (in no particular order) Sac Chess, Colossus, Opulent Chess, Gross Chess, and Hectochess. Also, on a side note, I tend to not favor games that are not much like chess, escpecially if their rules are complicated like they are in Decima or if their presets don't contain full rule enforcement.

These diagrams are a wonderful thing. They can easily describe various moves that Game Courier can't handle without using complicated code. However, I have a few suggestions that, in my opinion, would make the diagram even better.

• Tame pieces - The modifier t on a final (or only) leg of a move means that move cannot capture royal pieces in XBoard. In other words, it is the opposite of the modifier k on a final (or only) leg of a move, which means that move can only be used to capture royal pieces. This modifier should be relatively easy to implement.
• Custom definition of royal pieces - Currently, the only piece that is specified as royal by the diagram is the last piece on the diagram. Some variants may have more than one kind of royal piece (i.e. Chu Shogi), which makes this a useful extension, especially if the royal pieces must stay out of check.
• Triple Captures - This is without a doubtthe hardest extension to implement. Adding this would, in theory, require adding a lot more code to handle the second locust capture. However, this extension would be necessary for the Lion Dog, which can capture three pieces in a straight line, and other pieces that can capture three pieces at once. There might be a way to do this with the WierdChain function. However, that function hasn't been used in your diagrams other than in the Paco Shako diagram.

The rule for deciding who moves first is no longer a part of this game, but I forgot to remove it from the Rules section. It has now been removed from both this page and the corresponding Game Courier presets.

Is there any way to make the applet recognize hopping pieces like Cannons (mRcpR) and Vaos (mBcpB)?

Interestingly, the diagram doesn't grey out the squares that would result in moving into check when the royal piece is a Universal Leaper (XBetza notation: U), like the Emperor in Maka dai dai Shogi.

I have beeen assigned to the second round games, but none of them are showing up on My Games on Game Courier. I eventually found them using search filters, but when I tried to move, I got a error message saying that the file for the game could not be found on the website. This happened to me for all three games. Any help I can get would be appreciated.

I also noticed another thing about the diagram that I thought was very weird. When the diagram has at least 73 different pieces it starts combining the IDs of the first 6 pieces and replacing the actual ID of the piece with those. Specifically, it does this for the first group of 6, and then it skips two pieces. This process repeats until all 6 IDs have been used (So if the first 6 IDs are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, the overwritten IDs would be 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, and so on all the way to 66). For example, the diagram in you page on Maka Dai Dai Shogi replaces the IDs of the Furious Fiend (+Ln), Buddhist Spirit (+DS), Teaching King (+Dv), Crown Prince (+DE), and Emperor (+K) with PP, PGB, PE, PSt, and PT, respectively. This is probably due to a bug in the source code, as I can't see any reason to think that it was intentional. However, this is only a guess. Do you have any suggestions as to what might be causing this?