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Golem Chess. Variant where the Queen is replaced by the Golem, a piece that must be captured twice to remove it from play. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Greg Strong wrote on Mon, Nov 14, 2022 09:14 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 09:51 AM:

Code-wise it is much simpler to just redo the entire node under conditions where the GxG captures would be considered legal. All other moves would be immediate hash hits anyway.

I could certainly do something like this, and if I was writing a dedicated Golum engine I would.  Sorry, I should have been more explicit.  I am wondering if I can do it inside the framework I currently have (which of course you don't know in detail.)  I don't want to add extra code to the search function that is specific to a single game.  But you have given me an idea of how this might be incorporated into the framework in a general way that - hopefully - would be useful for other games.

Whenever a move is made, a MoveBeingMade message is sent to every Rule object, which can then return IllegalMove to deem it illegal.  (For example, the CheckmateRule tests to see if a royal piece is attacked and returns IllegalMove if so.)  I suppose I could add another possible return value - IllegalUnlessOnly (or words to that effect.)  Moves with those returns would initially be unmade, as with illegal moves, but set aside.  If there are only IllegalUnlessOnly moves, then they would all be made again and the IllegalUnlessOnly returns ignored.  This would add a tiny bit of overhead, but only a couple of if-thens at each node unless the value is actually used.

Good job with the Interactive Diagram!  It's pretty close to playing correct Golem Chess.  And, since it's mostly for demoing a game, I don't think it's essential for the ID to impelment every minor rule.  This is a pretty uncommon corner-case.  The anti-trading rule only at range 2 is more common though.  I made a similar decision to make it only applicable at range 2 in my game, Odyssey, which has been in ChessV for years but I have never gotten around to publishing.