Ratings & Comments

Okay, I have added David Paulowich as an inventor of this game.

Okay, I have published this to the site.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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.

Thank you Ben. I modified both pages to fix that.

Here's a diagram with a playable AI (my first, so let's see how this goes):

(So far this looks right. Having the defaults correctly detected for the common pieces means all that needed to be checked here is promotion and castling; really nice H.G.! But specifying promotion choices seemed finicky; without explicitly giving the knight's label it wasn't recognized, and depending on the order of the promotion choices I lost other choices as well.)

Maasai Chess page and the Game Courier preset can be released. Thanks to editors

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 think Heavy Shako would deserve a page of its own.

Thanks!