Game Reviews (and other rated comments on Game pages)

I like the idea, but perhaps a flaw in the game would be the unprotected pawn on a7. After 1 f4 Black has few defensive options and one would never arrive at "double king-pawn openings" since after 1...f5 2 Bxa7 already would drop and exchange in addition to the pawn. Maybe as in Schoolbook chess the Chancellor and Queen need to be out on the flank and the Archbishop deployed to the center.

Edited. Can you publish it please?

Are there no promotions in this version? Where is the prince and adventitious king?

No, it’s not easy win, black can easily block the path of check by 1.…Be7 or 1.…Qe7 after 1.Qe2

So it’s not required to add interactive diagram for THIS variant. But if it will be in online chess resource, thank you.

Sorry, but yellow X-es are captures!

I have an idea: you can turn Ox’s face to left in Stone Garden, as it was in my drawings, and make it different from Horizons. About Index it’s same. Please.

Points are accumulating. I’ve written this in the page.

One remark: can you watch Magician’s moves and make diagonal-based motion. And small Shielder’s regulation of replacing rules, but it’s not required for now.

Yeah, thank you very much!

I like the idea of this, although it seems possibly over-complicated with the momentum rules.

This is a great idea with those switches. Together with the twisting of the files it makes a very interesting board and game. The switches give instantly the game a dynamic tension which is enjoyable. And a very sophisticated solution that 2 squares together constitute 1 field on which there can only be 1 piece. There is no mentioning of pawn move/capture (maybe it could be helpful), but it must be implied that 'normal' forward movement and diagonal capturing are in place, that will often be first 'battle' around the switches.

What is better than 2 switches? That has to be 4 switches! The inventor, Gerd Degens, has also such a game, Chess69, which can be viewed through the link at the top, or for CVP members through the link in the comments. I will try to make a comment about it later. But I can only recommend to the editors that this game also is published properly. It is even more interesting because here the ranks are also twisted, very delightful for us fans of 'unusually shaped boards'. It already has a old post from 2003 here on CVP with a broken link in the Alphabetical Index and the Topic Index, so that will have to be displaced.

The premise for tri dimensional chess set's presence on federation star ships was to teach three dimensional combat tactics, which is something the Bartmess and Meder rules patently fail to do, by blocking circumventing moves.
The rules presented here, on chess variants, are not complete and lack rules for castling but also advocate inverted attack boards, which, if nothing else, are highly impractical.
Not only were the World Tri Dimensional Chess Federation rules written by a fighter pilot, to teach three dimensional aerial combat, which is more in keeping with the original theme, they also start the king and queen in the centre files and provide the most reasonable method for castling, as the attached images demonstrate.

King's side castling


Queen's side castling

Inspiring game, yet it seems the action may take a while to get going

I don't yet get how to mobilize in the opening smoothly when playing this CV, at least when I tried to do so in my first game (with White, no less). After I moved the pawn in front of my king two squares, for example, I wanted to develop my knights to my fourth rank, towards the centre, in natural fashion. Yet that would allow Black to develop his deves (camels) similarly, and then to take my knight(s) almost at will - perhaps clearly at least a slightly worse exchange for me, since my pawn structure might be compromised without sufficent compensation when I recapture, and by my valuations (though tentative) a Kt is worth more than a camel on 10x10 (maybe even by as much as a pawn).

As my game (with arx) went on, I found my gold and silver had a hard time being deployed usefully for quite some time - an issue since they can get in the way of other pieces. I also had mobilization issues with at least one of two of my bishops, especially concerning if assuming castling is desirable in general. The assassins I had a hard time valuing, but guessed one could be worth as much as a queen. Maybe the inventor intended that mobilization be slow in playing this CV, I don't know.

@arx: I've sent you a personal invite to a Sac Chess rematch, in case you missed it, and wish to play.

Hi Gerd, hope your fine and well. I'm sure you haven't upset or hurt anyone!! I understand what you said, and it is extremely interesting idea indeed how you describe your game about the board etc.

I don't want to go on about the pawns, but still, I have to say, the game would maintain your 'theme' even if the pawns remained pawns. However, the game as you have it must have a unique feel and play to it!

Would be fun to see the game in action.

Should play well, it's nice to see you didn't 'overpower' it.

I like the idea of making an army using various combinations of a few building blocks, though I do have two critiques.

1: Balance. A combination piece is usually wirth more than the sum of its parts (eg: a Queen is worth more than a Rook and a Bishop; a Mann is worth more than a Wazir and a Ferz) which means an army with A+B+C=7.75 is likely to be completely overpowered. For example, look at army 1:
BNW=10, NW=5.25, BW=5.25, W=1.25, B=3.25, N=3.25, BN=8.75 (total: 37).
This is over a full Rook stronger than the regular chess army.

The more equal the components are, the more powerful they are when they work together. For example, army 2 (where one component has most of the value) is only about 2 pawns stronger than the regular chess army. So, armies with wildly unequal component strengths will need to have stronger components than more egalitarian armies to compensate for this.

2: The components should be versatile enough to be fun to play with on their own. For example, an Alfil can only reach 1/8 of the board which is un-fun to play (both with and against). One solution to this would be 'ABCD' chess, with 4 components arranged like this:

By adding an extra component, one can eliminate the need for components to survive on their own, and can make weak components without having to worry about un-fun Alfil play.

Marsellais chess has a rule where each player moves 2 pieces in the same turn. Castling is considered a single move. All other castling rules apply.

Some Nemoroth pieces are 'color blind': they capture or otherwise affect friendly and enemy pieces in exactly the same way. The only effect of their allegeance is then which player is allowed to move them. But when they are petrified neither player can move them, and in effect they become neutral. An alabaster and an obsidian Leaf Pile are really the same piece, from a game-theoretical point of view, and that also holds for petrified Wounded Fiends. Likewise petrified Go Aways are all the same. And since they lose their special power on petrification, they are also the same as a Mummy. And they only differ from petrified Humans when we adopt the rule that petrified Humans promote to Zombie when pushed to last rank. Which would also make it necessary to distinguish petrified Humans by color.

Petrified Basilisks remember their allegeance because of the Basilisk's asymmetric move, which is preserved in the way it sees. Ghasts have a more severe effect on foes as on friends.

i think so

I think one thing the author may do until when and if this variant gets formally published here is to make a Zillions of Games implementation of it, then send an email to Ed van Zon to get the implementation published. There can be a long delay before a submission and its publication here, but Ed’s pretty good about publishing a submission within a week of its submission.

The hard part is taking all these rules and converting them in to Zillions’ quirky language. I enjoy doing it myself; it converts rules in to unambiguous machine-readable rules, and it allows people to play the variant themselves.

I would also change the name of the summoned pieces in to something like, oh, Dragon Horse and Dragon King, the Anglicized form of these pieces’ names in Shogi. I like the summoning tactic, but it’s an open question whether having it makes the White advantage overwhelming. People seem to enjoy Crazyhouse a lot over at Lichess, so I think this summoning mechanic can be very usable.

(I should also point out that Betza called what is the Jester here the “Waffle”)

The Heroine and Popess piece types in this variant arguably (nicely) complete the combination of compound pieces I used in my own (earlier) 10x10 Sac Chess variant.

On the topic of piece names, I've noticed that in some languages the name for a chess rook translates to ship (or to boat, also). Thus 'Admiral' (or my choice of 'Sailor', in Sac Chess) gets bonus points as a choice of name, perhaps (for the piece type in question, a promoted rook in shogi), i.e. a person who uses a watercraft's power.

Maybe there's a slightly related argument that a real-life knight, in the past, is a person who uses a horse (arguably knight is a more elevated title than horseman, which would also work).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rook_(chess)#Name_translations

The Wolf is ranked higher (stronger) than the Dog.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/鬥獸棋

象>獅>虎>豹>狼>狗>貓>鼠

Elephant > Lion > Tiger > Leopard (Panther) > Wolf > Dog > Cat > Rat

I played this since childhood. This is the proper ranking of the animals.

The confusion about Dog > Wolf happened because on some of the cheap chess pieces, the wood carving of the Dog and the Wolf are almost identical.