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Foolish King Chess. Players have different armies and victory conditions. White has a fool for a king. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Sep 26, 2020 03:42 PM UTC:
files=10 ranks=8 promoZone=1 promoChoice=*H*F graphicsDir=/graphics.dir/alfaeriePNG/ squareSize=50 graphicsType=png symmetry=none maxPromote=2 extinction=1 royal=9 royal=8 baring=4 baring=5 baring=9 pawn:P:ifmnDfmWfceF:pawn:a2,b2,c2,d2,e2,f2,g2,h2,i2,j2,,a7,b7,c7,d7,e7,f7,g7,h7,i7,j7 knight:N:N:knight:c1,f1,h1,,b8,c8,h8,i8 bishop:B:B:bishop:d1,g1 rook:R:R:rook:a1,j1,,a8,j8 cardinal:C:BN:cardinal:b1,i1 queen:Q:Q:queen:,,f8 hunter:H:BnDD:archer:,,d8,g8:0,10 fool:F:mkNmkW:fool:e1:10,0 king:K:KisO2isO3ilO4kN:king:,,e8

It seems the above diagram does approximately what is needed. The diagram script initially choked on only black having a piece that can castle; the code for determining the castling partners only considered white pieces, assuming symmetry, and thus left things undefined, which propagated through the calculation to finally make everything undefined. I fixed this now.

I also had some problems with the implementation of baring. This counted only non-royal pieces. But in this variant black should not suffer even from being totally bared, and I thought I was clever by defining the King as a piece that should be counted. But the old code overruled that. I changed the code so that it now only discounts the royal from the total number of pieces when it was not explicitly defined by a royal=N line (in which case the last piece in the table is taken to be royal). This allowed me to define the black King as a baring piece as well as a royal, so that being bared is the same as losing your King. For white, however, the Rooks and Archbishops are baring pieces, and the Fool an extinction royal.

Another problem was the promotion. I could have defined it as Shogi promotions, as there is apparenly no choice. But then white and black pawns would have to be different piece types, as they promote differently. (And it would allow youto defer.) So I opted for another solution: I allow promotion to Hunter or Fool, but only to pieces 'in hand'. And the white hand starts with only 10 Fools, and the black hand with only 10 Hunters.

The capture restriction on Fools is implemented by a BadZone JavaScript routine embedded in the page. The AI pays attention to this. For castling I just took flexible castling.