Game Reviews (and other rated comments on Game pages)

I'm not quite sure whether I want to rate this Good or Excellent so I'll go with the higher rating. This is a great way to enhance weaker pieces without making them too strong. An interesting variation of this idea might be to have all the pieces except the king and queen start without their non-capturing king moves and gain them by promoting on the last two ranks.

Similar to Courier-Spiel, the game adds modern Bishops and improves the Elephants (called Couriers here). Switching the Bishops and Couriers in the initial setup will improve this game. While the b-file and h-file Pawns are now undefended, they are also no longer threatened by hostile Bishops. Jumping the Courier c1-c3 will help to shield the Pawn on (b2).

Some time before 1992, Paul V. Byway included the Ferz in Modern Courier Chess, placing RNCBFQKFBCNR on a 12x8 board. Ken Franklin also placed Alibabas in Leap Chess on 44 squares.

Back in [2018-03-04] Kevin Pacey mentioned "the pleasing possibilities of smothered ... mates".  My 12x12 variant Rose Chess XII has 96 empty squares, with ten Pawns each on the 4th and 9th ranks.  But Black can deliver a smothering mate with a circular Nightrider on the second move of the game.  A position so amusing that it earned a diagram at the top of the rules page.

"This rule gets rid of zugzwang." 
 
More than sixty years ago I learned how to use zugzwang to win with King and Rook against the lone King. So how does Tony Berard deal with this problem? 
 
"The rooks, bishops, and knights now also move and capture like a king." 
 
Sixteen years ago I commented on Ultra Chess (by Ruggero Micheletto).  Here is a question for both authors.  Is the endgame King and Rook versus King and Knight even more likely to lead to a draw in your chess variants?

Here is a Fairy-Stockfish variant file that I made for the variant. Despite the E and Elephant symbol, these pieces are still princes (princE). It might not be 100% accurate, but this should be incredibly similar to the actual variant, as there are essentially no differences between promoting the princes to kings to win (by getting them directly to the last rank) or merely getting the princes to the end of the board (the last rank) to win. This variant also has defined castling rules.

[chessii:janus]
startFen = rnbeqkebnr/pppppppppp/10/10/10/10/PPPPPPPPPP/RNBEQKEBNR w KQkq - 0 1
customPiece1 = e:WF
pieceToCharTable = PNBRQ............E...Kpnbrq............e...k
castlingKingsideFile = i
castlingQueensideFile = c
whiteFlag = *8
blackFlag = *1
flagPiece = e
maxFile = 10
archbishop = -
promotionPieceTypes = rnbq

This is meant to be used with https://fairyground.vercel.app/, and should be pasted into a file called variants.ini, before loading the variants.ini file into the website.

Hi, David! Glad to see you back! This is a nice helpmate and looks like an interesting 'little' game to play - all that power in the corners and a weak center, on a small board! The central rook is a rare feature, or was, a decade or two ago. Who's used it besides Ralph, you, and me, any idea? I don't remember it in even any semi-popular game onsite aside from what you and Ralph have done.

I played this on brainking.com many times and it is fun, even if the outcome is more dependent on luck than on skill.

This is a nice game. It seems to have a theme of rook + weaker piece compounds. I wonder why the board isn't 15x10 to make room for another knight, and have a nice 3:2 shape like Courier Chess. An alternative enhancement would be a pair of camels on d1 and k1 and a camel-rook on i1. That would make more sense of the 10 rank board.

Spartan Chess has the Warlord and the General, together worth approximately three Rooks. These are solid performers that have been used in many variants. Worth noting that pieces like the Lieutenant with additional noncapturing moves are rare. My Shatranj Kamil (64) has Elephants with noncapturing Dabbabah leaps and ArchMage Chess by Cyrus Arturas has the Prince, a Commoner with noncapturing R2 moves (no mention of Dabbabah leaps). In the diagram below, a Warlord pins a Rook against the White King - winning the piece and the game.

WHITE TO MOVE AND LOSE

Nice mixture of pieces in this variant!

edit: Also, this CV reminds me a little of Opulent Chess:

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/opulent-chess

edit2: Two CVs that might have been inspired by TenCubed Chess (but weren't):

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/soho-chess

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/wide-soho-chess

I fixed it, it's your turn. There is no castling here;)

I'm a bit surprised this variant hasn't been played much so far on GC. If people think there's too much power in the setup, maybe by switching the FIDE army of each side onto their 2nd ranks, directly behind their pawns, that then could help the game unfold a bit more slowly, if that's desired.

I fixed things about horse promotions, but quality of pieces’ images on the submission’s diagram is amazing in the worst sense of it.

I think that’s bug

Nice idea!

A cute and cool variant!

As far as I can see there is no rule that forbids moving the King back to the place where it came from (at least, when the King move wasn't motivated by escaping check). So a situation can occur where the two players just move the King between two squares in an endless loop and the game makes no progress.

Note that in the setup of shogi (a Classic game) none of the knights there can move, either.

Thank you. So I missed out one thing.

It was in the rules but wasn’t in the pieces desc. Read about King, you’ll find.

Sort of Almost Chess - with a White Chancellor and a Black Queen - is kind of the best chess game ever invented on less than 81 squares. Skipping the usual long speech about making opening books obsolete and adding new tactics, I will simply state that the dreaded First Move Advantage is completely cancelled. Possibly "more than cancelled" - computer testing may prove interesting.

In the near future I will be promoting this variant to join the list of Featured Games. Maybe we could give Sort Of Almost Chess a more interesting name, like Carrera's Revenge?

Thanks, can you publish it please?

Great idea to replace the Ferz with the Gryphon! This piece rarely gets a chance to dominate an "old fashioned game". The "Griffon" is actually one of the weaker pieces in Mark Hedden's Ganymede Chess . I offer some piece values for the 12x8 board, chosen primarily for simplicity:

Pawn = 1, Woody Rook (WD) = 3, Knight = 3, Elephant (FA) = 3.25, Courier = 3.50, Man (FW) = 3.50, Rook = 5.50 and Gryphon = 8 points.

Incidentally I value the Queen at ten points, the same as R+B+P. Ralph Betza once calculated the Gryphon's worth by multiplying the value of a Rook by 1.46 in Bent Riders circa 2002.

Have we missed the fiftieth anniverary of Modern Courier Chess? The rules page for Reformed Courier-Spiel (2011) contains the sentence: "With this design, Begnis also intended to improve Modern Courier Chess invented by FIDE Master Paul V. Byway in 1972."

On his own website, Clément Begnis writes: "In this respect, I need to mention here that at first (in the 1970's), Byway had made an attempt to modernize the Courier game with more powerful extra pieces."

On his own website, John Savard writes: "Attempts have been made to modernize the game, one in 1824 and one in 1971. The one in 1971, Modern Courier Chess, changed the moves of several of the pieces. Even that of 1824 by Albers made a number of changes, although it was less radical."

The current address is: Modern Courier Chess. Meanwhile, the year when Byway finished creating his game remains a mystery. VARIANT CHESS No. 8 does contain the following game from the previous year - with the letters "F" and "C" standing for Ferz and Courier (Alibaba).

[Game 4]  R. Talbot - P. V. Byway, 10 xii 1991 
1.f4 f5 2.a4 c5 3.Ra3 Cc6 4.g4 fxg4 5.Rg3 h5 6.i4 
Ch6 7.e3 g5 8.ixh5 gxf4 9.Rxg4+ Fg7 10.Qj5+ i6 
11.hxi6 Ni7 12.Qi5 Ng6 13.Qxk7 Rj8 
[Diagram uses elephants for couriers] 
rn1bfqk1br2pp1pp1f2pQp2e3neP5p9P4pR9P8PPP3P1PPP1NEBF1KFBENR 
14.Rxg6 Bxg6 15.i7 Ri8 16.Qxj7 Fe6 (courier leap) 17 .Ch3 
Ke8 (two-move privilege) 18.Nj3 16 19.Ni5 Bxk2 
(suicidal) 20.Rk1 Bi4 21.Rk8 Resigns. (1-0).

This is a great idea. The bombs add enough chaos to make the game feel very different, but not too much.

I read on the wiki talk page for Tenjiku about the idea that jumping generals could have been intended to do more than just jump-capture.

The start position shows the generals in front of the Fire Demons, both straight ahead and diagonally. There is no opportunity for jumping generals to capture Fire Demons in the start position, which is intentional.

It doesn't seem right that there is so much protection for Fire Demons, yet in some versions of the game, the King could be threatened and captured without even being able to evade the attack, as it's boxed in.

(In fact, the Bishop General could just mate the opponent's King on the first move if there were no restrictions on jumping.)

If the generals could jump whenever they wanted as far as they liked, the game would become even more tactically sharp than it already is. However, it doesn't break the game.

The Great General can't jump two squares diagonally to threaten one of the Fire Demons as the Rook General would capture it.

The best the Bishop Generals can do is to manoeuvre and attack a Horned Falcon or Soaring Eagle.

The idea that jumping generals could capture all of the opposing pieces they jumped over in one turn is plausible. I don't know if the game would break, but the inventor(s) of Tenjiku weren't sentimental about pieces — allowing Fire Demons to punch large holes into positions — so having more pieces do the same seems logical.

The Great General could just capture the Vice General; Free Eagle; Queen; Drunk Elephant; and a Pawn on the first move (with check). This doesn't seem intentional.

One of the Bishop Generals could move to the edge of the board and threaten to capture a Soaring Eagle; Water Buffalo; Phoenix; Drunk Elephant; and a Pawn. The Soaring Eagle can leap out of the way, though.

Otherwise, everything is sufficiently well defended that jumping generals couldn't capture a total of anything worth more than themselves, as they are even stronger than their current form.

That could be why Fire Demons are so powerful — with burning and sliding and an area move — because they would be ecliped otherwise by the jumping generals.

The board size (16×16) and large number of pieces that do very little makes more sense if there were even more crazy pieces. The game might devolve into a capture-fest, but that might have been the intention.

Whoever had the imagination to create this game has to be admired. I consider this to be the most ambitious of all the historical variants as its construction is so delicately balanced, even with the ambiguity in the rules themselves.