Ratings & Comments

Thank you. I admit that of the armies I designed I like the Silly Sliders best, aesthetically. Unfortunately I couldn't do much testing, as my main PC broke down. I would really like to do some testing on the Onyx; in fact that piece is what gave me the idea for this army. I was looking for a non-colorbound version of the Bishop, for measuring whether the B-pair bonus would really disappear in that case. Because there is an alternative explanation for this bonus, namely that two diagonal slides on opposit square shades cooperate exceptionally well. Playing Bishops against Onyxes in pairs or singletons could decide this matter.

A second point of interest would be whether the penalty for a leap being lame depends on whether the square where the leap can be blocked is attacked by the piece itself, or not. In a sense all distant slider moves are lame leaps, but they cannot be blocked without exposing the blocker to one of those. Playing Onyx + Duck vs Bishop + Rook would be a 'low-noise' experiment for investigating this. Between them they have exactly the same moves, which can be blocked the same way, but the Onyx and Duck do not attack the adjacent blocking squares, while the Bishop and Rook do.

Interesting that the name Duck was used for FDD by Jelliss. This has a very similar footprint. Is it known which variant employed this piece? If i is imporant to keep the distinction between these pieces, I could  change mine to 'Lame Duck'.

The Silly Sliders are one of the weirdest Chess experiences I have had. They are so strange: One attacks by retreating and unlocking the far range moves and one escapes from attack by approaching the figures. I'd suspect that the army is a bit weaker than the FIDEs because the ranging pieces can be stuffed. A blocking piece on the ski square doesn't even need protection. The rotated short range moves of the Onyx and the Duck have unusual interactions with the pawn formations.

All in all: A great design worth trying.

I do not know if there is a game with Dabbabarider Fers piece, possible but yeah, I'm not sure. I can't recall seeing one myself.

I never meant for you to change name, I was just giving info. I understand though you might want to change, and Lame Duck is interesting name!!

If I do see a game with the piece I'll let you know.

They are in the directory /graphics.dir/alfaeriePNG35/ . Don't forget to change to graphicsType=png .

I am confused. Yesterday I created a new page for a new entry called "Maasai Chess". This page is now waiting for approval by editors. This is not the problem.

After, I wanted to create a new Game Courier preset to play this Maasai Chess. Then, I follow the link to create a new GC preset. But at the end, the process gives a similar template than for a normal page entry. This is confusing.

So, I started from an existing GC preset of my own, I modified it, I renamed it "Maasai Chess", I saved it and I spent my evening working on it. This morning, I wanted to come back on it and continue ... but I can't find it. Where is it?

When I look under my name to my unpublished submissions, I see the normal page for "Maasai Chess" but for the GC preset I just see the void page I had made, and not the file I had worked on yesterday.

May someone help me?

It seems to me that the black player who chooses the setup has an advantage to his white opponent who doesn't know what will be the setup. It is true that the black player may know an opening theory for his favorite setup but as they are a lot of possible setups, one would have to know a lot of opening theories which is reducing the impact in my opinion.

There is no game-theoretical advantage from choosing btween a number of symmetric, and therefore mostly equivalent start position. The only way black can derive any advantage from this is by having very extensive opening knowledge for the setup he is going to choose. Only white would have to prepare for all openings, if he has no clue what black is going to choose. (Which presumably is hopeless, due to the large number.) Black, however, only has to prepare for one, and can use that one in every game he plays as black. (And even if it is commonly known what he will pick, it is not much help to the white player if he has to play a variety of opponents.)

So I think that rather than doing away with the burden of opening theory, your rules compell the players to study opening theory for black, in order to neutralize the first-move advantage.

I agree that it is exceedingly unlikely that anyone would ever develop opening theory for these games. And of course it is your design, and you can pick the rules anyway you like them.

But what I object to (since your submission is open for review) is your claim that the rule you propose compensates the first-move advantage. Especially if you don't believe yourself that black would ever go to the trouble of developing opening theory, it is a misleading claim.

It can be argued that if chess is a forced draw from opening position, then first move advantage doesn’t exist at all. Yet even if someone showed proof that chess is drawn game, humans would still atribute some advantage to white. Its not completely unreasonable that someone migth derive advantage from playing with more familiar setup (assuming one would play this variant enough). Quantifying this advantage and comparing it to first move advantage is another story though.

Its not completely unreasonable that someone migth derive advantage from playing with more familiar setup (assuming one would play this variant enough).

It is very questionable, though, whether in a variant this large where the differences in setup are applied somewhere in the rear of the army, that there will be anything familiar at all to the position by the time the battle really starts. Black can force white to start with (some of his) pieces in a certain constellation, but he cannot control what moves white will play afterwards. Most white players would play totally different, and by the time the pieces in the back-rank come into play you would always be in a position you have never seen before. Unless black is playing against the same white player all the time, which would also stick to the single variation he likes. In which case the position would be just as familiar to that white player, and the alledged compensation would go up in smoke.

True, this variant is quite big and the changed pieces are behind 2 rows of predetermined "pawns", the shuffled pieces will not affect the board in the opening much. I haven’t considered how large this variant is.

It would be nice if the interactive diagram could be given a "zoom" setting like the diagram designer has.

This would be possible only if we use the SVG images directly in the diagram, or when the diagram would directly use the SVG renderer. The latter is obviously already possible, as it is what the diagram editor does: this is based on the normal diagram with the graphicsDir set to the URL of the renderer. But the render is off-site, and so far Fergus did not manage to compile it on the CVP server due to CentOS - Ubuntu differences. So this is not recommended.

As to directly using the SVG: I am not sure if all browsers can do that. Perhaps by now they can. In that case the HTML specifying the image can specify the desired size, and I could have the diagram script include the size specifier. But there would not be any color subsitutions; no way HTML or browsers are going to do that. So it would require the SVGs to be available in both colors. I suppose this is easy to achieve with an edit script.

It won't solve Aurelian's problem, though, which is that the PNG / SVG alfaerie set does not yet cover everything that is available as GIF.

What is wrong with displaying the text in the browser at 80%?

@Aurelian: scaling the raster images makes them more ugly, and the GIF set is quite ugly to begin with. Its use should be discouraged even when no scaling is necessary / desired. Anyway for Grand Apothecary Modern all pieces you need are available, not?

@Greg: We really should continue expanding the SVG set. Perhaps on a demand basis. If Aurelian just needs two or three new images, it would not be that much effort to create those.