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Jocly. An html-based web platform for playing 2-player abstract stategy games.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Jan 14 03:53 PM UTC in reply to François Houdebert from 12:45 PM:

OK, so be it. It will give us the opportunity to perfect what we have. Such as docs for the shogi variants. I would also like to use a real Stork and Goat in Scirocco, instead of the shrunken Eagle and Antilope. And perhaps refactor Makromachy to work with cbPiecesFromFEN.

I am also wondering if we should not combine nearly identical variants. For Metamachy there is a 'prelude', where the black player first has to choose one of 12 different setups for King, Queen, Lion and Eagle. That is a lot better than having 12 different versions of Metamachy in the index. Similarly, Musketeer Chess starts with a prelude where the players first have to pick the exotic pieces they want to participate. This also avoids the combinatorial explosion of variants one would otherwise have.

I am worried that in the long run we will get congestion in the 'Other Jocly Games' list; one-step selection has its limits, and by combining sub-variants that only differ in initial setup or in whether you already start with a promoted version of a piece would be a simple method for implementing two-step selection.

So wouldn't it be better to combine the 'wild' timurid variants into a single game? After all, Wild Tamerlane is hardly an independent game; virtually all positions in its game tree also occur in the game tree of Tamerlane II, after promotion of a non-Pawn. So an implementation of Tamerlane II must already be able to play Wild Tamerlane. We might as well use the same implentation for it, that first asks whether you want to play 'wild' or basic. And if we are at it, it might as well ask whether you want to replace the Queen by a Lion or Wolf, in addition to replaceing the Ship.

Btw, this is an up-looking Goat (The Tube tool can now also use a shear transform to spread out the ears!):