Ratings & Comments

I see your diagram image is a JPG file. For diagrams like this, GIF or PNG will normally give you a smaller file size. Also, the color of the Black pieces is a little too dark to easily make out details. I would recommend lightening them a bit.

As in your other page, different colors for the movement indicators would be better. Using dots instead of coloring the entire square would be nicer, and can be done with an ! or # in the diagram designer (which would need to be url-encoded, so don't just edit the URLs).

I see, well it's already in PNG format so no issue there

I'm ready to publish. Could an editor review this page please?

I see, well it's already in PNG format so no issue there

So it is. That probably happened when you added file and rank markings to it. I reduced the filesize from 231116 bytes to 65655 bytes by changing it from a true color image to a 32 color image.

Hi Fergus,

Thanks for your comment. I have replaced the blue squares at the centre with green.

There is supposed to be 3x3 palace (like Xiangqi) at the centre of the board, hence the different colours.

Nice! any more amendments I should make?

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your suggestion. I have changed the piece diagrams and use dots to indicate their movements.

With so many pieces, the game could be easier to learn if you used piece names that were already in common usage rather than making up a bunch of new ones.

It looks fine. I've now published it.

I made a few small changes and published this. I corrected the spelling of default, mentioned that the ChessCraft app is for Android, and used an H3 heading for the smaller variant.

I made a few modifications and published this.

I agree that the pieces are so many that they're harder to learn, in earlier amendments I have made changes to the pieces' names before to eliminate all the piece names that are too commonplace like the Ferz to the Fürst, the Man to the Mullah, as another editor suggested (notice that I changed the piece name that is on the Piececlopedia to something that isn't on the Piececlopedia). but now I am asked to change the name of pieces that isn't on the Piececlopedia to the ones in the Piececlopedia. The basis on which I named the pieces is on the grounds of notation, purpose, and design.

Firstly, regarding notation, each piece's name's first letter (except for the regular chess knight) corresponds with its notation, and with 26 types of pieces, it fits nicely with the 26 letters of the English alphabet. I did some cross-checking with the Piececlopedia and found that even if I use the name of the piece commonly attributed with a move in the Piececlopedia, and even if I don't confine myself to the first letter of the piece, still, the letter J, S, V, W, X, and Y will not be represented. Thus some pieces must have double letters for their notation, like (A) for the amazon then (AR) for the archbishop, or have a notation of a letter that isn't on the piece name itself (in both cases, it will be more confusing don't you think?).

Secondly, regarding the purpose of the game, there is no doubt that a human needs a lot of effort to learn how to play this game, and I would be honored if anyone would take the time to learn how to play it, but for an engine (the reason I designed this variant in the first place is for engines to play it) it needs not to memorize the moves of the pieces nor its notation since a computer is just following what it is programmed to do.

Thirdly, there is the game theme and design. I named the piece to more or less correspond with its design (though some pieces correspond better than others, for example, the zorro used to be the zebra hence it is represented by a zebra). In the GitHub repository, I have provided more information on the design ideas of the pieces (how the pieces in the King's Court is designed with royalty in mind, like how the Fürst is represented by a royal West-Sumatran headpiece, how the Esquire is represented by the Isicholo, a Zulu African headdress, or how the Duchess is represented by the Kokoshnik, a Russian headdress) to change the names of the pieces means eliminating the significance of their design to their name, or to painstakingly redesign all the pieces to befit their new name from scratch will overhaul the overall theme of the game.

with that being said, as some sort of a workaround, I made a table to better understand the pieces' moves

Do the "crowned" pieces become royal? I.e., do they gain ONLY the movement capabilities of the King, or do they have to be checkmated along with the King?

Ed. note: I've moved this to the Kingsmen thread on the assumption that was what was intended. Please let us know if this is the wrong place; it was originally posted as a comment on the home page.

Thanks, Fergus.

Thanks, Ben.

The new layout of the piece descriptions looks good. I have added more comments in the checkmate section on how the tetrahedrons can also be checkmated by forking and skewering them, provided the attacking piece is not captured in the next move and the attack cannot be blocked.

While checkers pieces can be used as pawns, I thought it would be easier for the average chess player to use actual pawn pieces if they are familiar with chess already. I've added a note in the equipment section to clarify this.

I have added a few words in the pawn promotion section to emphasize that the promotions are only for capture. I hope it is clearer now. I also added some comments on how advancing the pawn to the last rank like orthodox chess may not be the best idea since it will not be able to advance passively anymore.

In theory, a single pawn or a Platonic solid piece can checkmate the opponent by forking the two Tetrahedrons. So there will always be enough material to checkmate the opponent as long as you have a Platonic solid piece or a Pawn that is not stuck at the last rank. I mention some of the possible forks and skewers in the checkmate section. Beyond that, I haven't gotten into any in-depth mating material analysis yet.

The CECV doesn't specify castling rules on the larger board. I would assume it's the same as ordinary queenside, but can anyone check the what the Zillions implementation has done? I'll also check Ed's java implementation when I have the chance to use a java-applet-supporting browser.

(a reminder to myself to add the Promotion-Zone tag after this is published)

Hi David,

Thanks for your question.

The crowned pieces have the ability to move one square in any direction like the King, but they are not royal. They can be captured just like any regular piece.

I've added a sentence to clarify this in the promotion section.

@HG: would you agree that the chiral Aanca of the Bent Bozos could be renamed Left and Right Manticore now?

That's great, thank you Fergus.

I added links to the mentioned games, and I added the name of the game that is not simply named for its inventor. For those who might be familiar with Capablanca's Chess but not with Capablanca Random Chess, it may be worth mentioning that castling works as it does in Fisher Random Chess, not as it does in Capablanca's Chess. As those without any familiarity with Capablanca's Chess may expect, castling works by moving the King two spaces toward the Rook, not three spaces, which is the rule in Capablanca's Chess.

Thank you very much!

I like this!

Is there a Mongolian reader of this site who can tell if there is good historical value in this book: https://www.taobao.com/list/item/555469295901.htm, the parallel Chinese title of which seems to say it treats the historical origin of shatar? It is a little perplexing or enticing that the cover seems to sport the playing board for ix buga, a version of merels, maybe?

I like this, it brings out a rural realm to the game. Well done!

Having implemented this variant in Ai Ai and having played it a bunch of times, I really enjoy this game. Being a large Shogi fanatic, the higher piece density of Yangsi doesn't bother me in the slightest :)

For me this game is an improvement on something like Sac Chess, as the pieces in Yangsi are more interesting to use. In fact I was inspired by this game to make what I called 'Heavy Shako', an extension of Shako that fills in all the gaps in the back rank with other pieces used in the larger variants by Jean-Louis Cazaux. The original concept was much improved by some excellent advice from Jean-Louis, and the resulting game has been a lot of fun.

I'd enjoy seeing an extension of Yangsi to 12x12 with a high-density setup, too.

I have to admit, yet I also think it so very evident to everyone, that the "next evolution of Chess" truly is the most complicated puzzle in the history of the world.

Sorchess has been revised a number of times. Let's not shy from the truth, it is obvious that the repeated occurrence of necessary revisions is an inevitability of any game attempting to solve this paradox.

Yet as far as I can see, which depends on various factors but mostly atmosphere, Sorchess is now finalized. I actually think the biggest puzzle in all of this was how to simply get this piece to work on an 8x8 board.

I have gone through numerous Opening scenarios involving a White Wizard assault on the Black King/Queen/Rook and to my knowledge they are all defendable with no fatal imbalancing of the game.

The fundamental mechanic which keeps the game balanced is the rationing of only ONE Wizard per player and which ONLY enters from ONE of either Rooks. This reduces early assaults to only narrow Opening lines along very selective routes.

Remember: a Wizard can capture to b5/g5 straight out of the Rook on a8/h8. Or defend the Rook by exiting it to d7/e7, or even fianchetto in place of the Bishop, allowing the Bishop out perhaps to a6/h6 and thus providing both pieces defence.

In any case I believe any worries or concerns I previously harboured about my game have been remedied and purified now with this here good dedicated revision of the rules.

Thank you for reading.

I would like to change that sentence which is presenting my new game Maasai Chess:

Large CV with 48 pieces per side, of 20 types including Sergent Maasai as improved Pawns

I wish to write:

Large CV with 48 pieces per side, of 20 types including both regular and rapid Pawns

May I do it? Or an editor can do it for me? Thank you

Well, the Queen is also a piece in FIDE chess, so I'm not sure how this helps the argument.

For a game designed for kids, adding a queen gives them a lot of power without introducing a constraint. And the objective, it seems, is to make the game easy enough for kids while introducing them to the notion of constraints of movements.

The queen is literally a combination of a rook and a bishop, so it would be loopsided to have a queen and a rook (or a queen and a bishop).

Better to have just the bishop and the rook, which gets little kids start learning about constraints.

Just my humble opinion (I only landed on this page looking for a place where my kid could play demi chess online, so far I can't find one.)

I've updated the link description and published this page.

I found the "en passant...is identical to the regular chess Pawn" for the Maasai a little disconcerting because it doesn't address inter-type interaction. Of course, you address that in the Rules section. Maybe just add a note to the piece description that these are addressed in the Rules section?

It is always very useful to get feedback from first-time users. So I am curious what exactly made defining the promotion choice non-trivial. To start with, which method did you use to generate the diagram? Did you use the Play-Test Applet, the Design Wizard in the article about Interactive Diagrams, or did you compose the diagram by hand-editing yourself? And if you used one of the 'wizards', did you do any post editing of the HTML these produced?

BTW, your diagram is not yet fully correct: you did not specify a royal=N parameter, and that makes the last piece you defined the royal by default. And you have ordered the pieces such that the Queen is last. To cure that either reorder the pieces so that the King is last, or add the line royal=5.

The Play-Test Applet should use N as ID for a Knight, in the table from which you can select the pieces. The Design Wizard probably takes the first letter of the name as an ID by default, which would give you an undesired K. Perhaps I should program an exception for that.

P.S. The Play-Test Applet seems to contain a bug; when I move the King that is present by default to a corner, it asks me to promote it! I will check out what causes this; it seems a very unnatural thing to do.

I have played this game extensively in the Ai Ai software package since adding it, and I feel it may be the best iteration so far of Jean-Louis Cazaux's series of 12x12 variants. The piece density and variety generate very interesting interactions on the board. The various Pawn- and Pawn-like pieces in the 3rd/4th ranks create a nice sense of progression, leading the board to gradually open up and allow more powerful pieces to enter the fray.

In a sense, the game reminds me slightly of a Chess equivalent to Dai Dai Shogi, which has a long opening phase that gradually expands into a delightfully complex middlegame. As a fanatic for large Shogi I consider this a plus :)

In any case, I highly recommend this game for fans of larger variants. In the future I hope Maasai might generate some similar developments of Gigachess and Terachess as well. I have experimented a bit myself with adding the two ranks of mixed Pawns to those games and the results were quite enjoyable.

I used the Play-Test Applet, followed by some editing of the html. Specifically, since the queen doesn't appear in the initial setup, I needed to add it to the promotion choices, which subsequently required adding it to the piece list (hence its appearance last, which I didn't remember indicating royalty).

The Play-Test Applet also produced a more-verbose version of the piece descriptions than necessary, so I pruned those down based on viewing another of your posted diagrams. But then the issue with the knight came up, and it seemed that it needed the explicit id.

It seemed (though I went through many iterations, so perhaps there was some other issue) that the order I listed the promotion choices in mattered for which ones became available.

I've updated my previous comment to fix the royalty, and I cannot recreate the issue with promotion list order.

I played a good amount of Chess 2 (actually I was very obsessed with it for a while, and I stole the ghost piece idea for the variant i posted on this site). Mostly I would play against stronger players, but beat them very badly using the Reaper army. Basically I played the game regularly with someone locally and we came up with all of these ideas with Reaper, and nobody learned how to deal with it in the time that I spent online with the game. So I do think the game probably needs some balance adjustments, particularly to Reaper, Two Kings, and Nemesis. The dueling system also doesn't feel that great a lot of the time. I really like the dueling in a lot of ways, but then there are situations where you can win/lose a game off of a single duel, and that can feel really awkward.

I just want to get a little bit more specific with my thoughts on the game's balance. I think Classic/Empowered/Animals are all pretty good where they are. I kind of feel like Empowered could be a little bit on the strong side, but I could be wrong on that.

Reaper, I think, kills pretty much everyone. I think Classic/Empowered/Animals all struggle immensely and might have just no hope against Reaper at all due to double ghost rook opening. I never saw anyone doing double ghost rook opening online, so maybe they figured out how to deal with it after I stopped playing, but I would completely stonewall players with tons of hours in the game with that. I think Reaper kills Nemesis too though. Maybe some people thought Nemesis beat them, but Nemesis just can't really deal with all of the blockades you can set up. I never really had trouble against Nemesis with Reaper, I would just tie them in knots and eat them alive. Anyway Reaper definitely would need to be nerfed

I think Reaper is basically helpless against Two Kings, though. The thing about Reaper is that it essentially needs midline invasion to win. Two Kings has absolutely no problem defending the midline, so they have to really screw up for you to have a chance.

I actually think Two Kings is probably too good overall, as well. I think they probably beat Empowered/Classic/Animals pretty comfortably, and then are like actually invincible against Reaper unless the Reaper outplays to an extreme degree. So Two Kings probably needs a nerf...

But then there's the problem that Two Kings dies horribly to Nemesis? I guess there's a chance they're actually okay against Nemesis somehow... but I wasn't able to figure it out in the time that I played. I feel like they really just get clobbered there.

So the balance problems seem tough to solve since there's kind of a rock-paper-scissors thing going on. I've thought of ways to weaken Reaper, weaken Two Kings, and make the Reaper vs Two Kings matchup much fairer, but no idea how to fix Two Kings vs Nemesis.

I used the Play-Test Applet, followed by some editing of the html. Specifically, since the queen doesn't appear in the initial setup, I needed to add it to the promotion choices, which subsequently required adding it to the piece list (hence its appearance last, which I didn't remember indicating royalty).

A work-around for such extra piece types could be to place them in the empty area of the board in the initial position. Then they will be put in the piece list, and in the post-editing you only have to delete the list of squares where they should be put.

The Play-Test Applet also produced a more-verbose version of the piece descriptions than necessary, so I pruned those down based on viewing another of your posted diagrams. But then the issue with the knight came up, and it seemed that it needed the explicit id.

I guess the problem with the Knight was that you pruned a bit too much. In particular the ID field for the Knight, which would have be an N if you had left it alone.

The order of the pieces in the promoChoice string should not matter; when a promotable piece reaches the zone the diagram just goes through the piece list, and for every ID tests whether it occurs (as a sub-string) in the promoChoice string. This algorithm failed when the IDs are not single letters, so I later supported a second format where you can specify a comma-separated list of promotion choices. If a comma occurs in the promoChoice it then only considers a piece ID a match if it occurs as a sub-string surrounded by commas.

Your description of Pawn promotion is a bit unintuitive. You describe it in terms of 1st through 4th ranks. Since I presume that promotion would be on the 1st through 4th ranks of the opponent, it would seem to say that a Pawn can move as a Rook on its player's 5th rank, as a Knight on a player's 6th rank, as a Bishop on a player's 7th rank, and as a King on a player's 8th rank. But the other order seems like it might be what you intend, since it allows slower and less powerful types of promotion before allowing quicker and more powerful types. So, please clarify promotion in terms of the ranks of the player who is promoting.

The Wizard enters play by exiting a friendly Rook, as if it were the Wizard standing there instead.

I interpret this as saying that the Wizard makes its first move as though it were sharing a space with a friendly Rook, and when it does this, the Rook remains on the space the Wizard made its first move from. Is that interpretation correct?

I added more details on how I invented Kingsmen and the thought process behind it.

I also added a link to play Kingsmen on Zillions of Games.

Hi Fergus, thanks for your comment.

I have changed the description of the Pawn promotion rules from the point of view of the player who is promoting - 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th ranks.

It took me some searching on this site to find back the thread on 72 Capablanca Variants here: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?itemid=72+Capa+variants

This variant was already proposed by David Paulowich before 1996 and it is mentioned in the preface on Ralph Betza's thoughts on Outrigger Chess here: https://www.chessvariants.com/d.betza/chessvar/outrig.html

Paulowich's variant has no page on this site (there is Victorian Chess https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/victorian-chess here which is similar but with the Archbishop in the Queen's position)