Ratings & Comments
Scirocco. On ten by ten board with over thirty different pieces. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Feb 10, 2019 08:03 PM UTC:@John Davis: BTW, what is your opinion about the chess variant 'Scirocco'? This also seems heavily Chu-Shogi inspired, except that rather than doing away with all the piece promotions, like you did, it seems to put even more emphasis on those. The piece designs used in the article here are of course awful, hardly any better than writing the name on them in kanji. (I guess this would be enough to discourage anyone from trying it...) But I made an implementation of it in Jocly ( http://hgm.nubati.net/jocly ) using chess-style pieces, and it was possible to shape most of the pieces such that it would be quite easy to recognize / remember how they move, for someone with a bit of knowledge on chess variants (i.e. who knows about Ferz, Wazir, Alfil, Dabbaba, Camel and Zebra).
8-Piece Chess. (Queen's Army chess, all 8 Back Rank Pieces different).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]For any questions, contact [email protected] or post here.
Balbo's chess. Board with a strange shape designed to make Bishops stronger in relation to Rooks. (Cells: 68) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Interesting board shape. I'm currently not absolutely sure that bishops are quite as strong as rooks, on average.
Shako_Balbo. Game with Diamond Shape Board.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]This game makes for a fine blend of two already interesting games.
At first when playing I felt like I was starting out missing an important pawn, but then I remembered that in chess, the Exchange Variation of the French Defence can produce plenty of interesting and decisive games, even between strong players.
8-Piece Chess. (Queen's Army chess, all 8 Back Rank Pieces different).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Grand Tamerlane Chess. 
John Davis invented this variation of Mideast Chess. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]@HG Muller
This is Grand Tamerlane Chess, not Grand Chu Chess
Thank you for noticing and your comment Nicolino. Mr Muller posted it here at my request. I only have an android phone and have not tried to submit my own rule pages. My idea with Grand Tamerlane, Grand Chu Shogi and Grand Courier is to make a basic set for beginners. Grand Chess and Eurasian Chess would round out the set.
8-Piece Chess. (Queen's Army chess, all 8 Back Rank Pieces different).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Wa Shogi. Game with many different rather weak pieces, with or without drops. (11x11, Cells: 121) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Just a guess, but this kind of version of shogi (i.e. of board size 11x11) might make for the optimally largest board size, if it's desired that games not take arguably too many moves in an average well-played game. I also don't know if Wa Shogi with drops would give computer engines a harder time if they played vs. people than would be the case for regular (9x9) shogi. Maybe Wa Shogi with drops would be hopeless for human players, in the long run in any case, if they're faced with a self-teaching machine.
Also, in the past I've noticed a game where a leading (and still active) Game Courier player remarked that he could not find anywhere to play Wa Shogi with drops against people online, which is the way I think I would much prefer to play it if I ever could give this well-tested game a try on Game Courier. At the moment there is no preset for Wa Shogi, with or without drops.
@ H.G: In case you've not noticed, the setup diagram for this Wa Shogi rules page currently is not showing up for some reason.
📝H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Feb 18, 2019 08:45 AM UTC:Thanks for warning me about the diagram; the link for the JavaScript powering it was still pointing to my own website rather than to the version here on CVP. Not sure why that did not work; because the file is still there, and I am sure it worked in the past. Perhaps more stringent security measures of modern browsers prevented the access. Anyway, I altered the link to point at the version of the file here on CVP. (The piece images are still taken from my website, though; I guess I should upload these here as well, so I can change that undesirable state of affairs.)
Games with drops are in general harder for computers, relative to humans. Until last year computers still lost to human experts in Crazyhouse. (And then Stockfish-variant appeared.) For regular Shogi the problem was solved earlier, but only through 'data-mining' the huge data base of human Shogi professionals, and absorbing their knowledge in a neural-network type evaluation. For Wa Shogi such a game data base does not exists. And I know only of one computer program that can seriously play it: my own engine Crazywa. (Some non-searching programs like ShogiVar support it, but these are real push-overs.) But I did not seriously tune it even there, and its strategy is simply a generalization of what it does in Crazyhouse, with purely guessed piece values.
I have no doubt that with Google's AlphaZero technology a super-strong player could be made. Wa Shogi is most certainly too insignificant to interest Google, though, or any large community of owners of computers with state-of-the-art graphics cards that would be needed to mimic such an effort (like the LeelaChess Zero project for Chess). So my guess is that computer Wa-Shogi players will remain relatively weak for a long time to come.
Implementing Wa Shogi in Jocly is on my to-do list; it should not be very difficult now that I have already done regular Shogi, so that its infra-structure for drops can be used. Jocly's AI is also laughably weak, however. But as I also made progress in setting up a Jocly based Game Server, it would offer an opportunity to play Wa Shogi on line.
Hectochess. 10x10 variant that can be played with 2 mismatched Chess sets.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Regarding the ability to let either side move first, this was criticized in the comments for Yangsi, and you removed it from that game. I hope you will do the same here.
Since your Cannon moves as a Leo, why not call it that and change your graphic images for it?
Chaturanga. The first known variant of chess. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Is anyone else finding weird similarities between Chaturanga (Davidson's variantion) and Makruk?
Makruk (Thai chess). Rules and information. (8x8, Cells: 64) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Is anyone else finding weird similarities between Chaturanga (Davidson's variantion) and Makruk?
Shakti. On a 7 by 7 board with disappearing squares. (7x7, Cells: 49) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]On the mindsports website, the 4 corner squares are said to be untiled
8-Piece Chess. (Queen's Army chess, all 8 Back Rank Pieces different).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Makarenko's Chess. Pieces are stacks which can be split and combined to create other pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Definitely reverse the values of bishop and rook. I suppose the prohibtion on splitting the last king even to form another king is to limit the king's mobity, else last king facing capture could move as a split off a bishop and fuse with a rook all the way accross the board. I wonder if this prohibition is needed for playabilty. My guess is that the case where my king is captured, I capute the enemy king, but opponent can't form a new king on the next turn would be a draw. I think I would prefer the simpler rule "a player who has no king at the start of his turn loses."
Hectochess. 10x10 variant that can be played with 2 mismatched Chess sets.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]💡📝A. M. DeWitt wrote on Fri, Mar 8, 2019 07:13 PM UTC: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.
Onitama. Cards decide how pieces move, perfect information with no chance beyond setup.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Hi, I don't know why this lists me as the inventor. I didn't make it, I just wanted it to be on the wiki. Thanks!
Ben Reiniger wrote on Mon, Mar 11, 2019 11:44 AM UTC:That's just the default behavior for a new submission, since most user-submitted pages are their own inventions. I've updated the information. Thanks!
I see 12 moves and only 5 cards. How are moves distributed on each card ?
Hi Aurelian, there are 16 move cards (frog and rabbit are on different cards, same for horse/ox, goose/rooster, eel/cobra), but only 5 are selected for each match. I will clarify this, I see now that my presentation was a bit vague
Wolf Chess. Half-century old variant on board of size 8 by 10. (8x10, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I've just bought the booklet on Wolf-Schach by A. von Wilpert.
The game was indeed invented in 1943, but the booklet was probably published in 1959 (as mentioned by amazon.de - the booklet itself does not give a date of publication). In fact, the booklet mentions two works written by J. Boyer in 1951 and 1954 respectively.
Onitama. Cards decide how pieces move, perfect information with no chance beyond setup.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Dragonchess. A three-dimensional fantasy variant. (3x(12x8), Cells: 288) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]There is a mistake for the Elemental. The original text for the Elemental has “The upward move can only be made if a capture is involved, but the downward move can be made without capturing.” The descriptive text above for the Elemental matches the intent of the original text but the diagram for the middle board does not. The four “x” on the middle board should be “c”.
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This is the (corrected) Interactive Diagram for Grand Chu Chess. I guess I hadn't looked carefully at the coordinates of the Stag, as I expected the setup to be Grand-Chess-like, with empty squares on the second rank.