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Hybrid Decimal Chess. Chess on a 10x10 board with unusual compound pieces included. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Mar 5 10:39 AM EST in reply to Kevin Pacey from 10:03 AM:

The generated GAME code by default applies the 50-move rule. You can change that by appending a line

set rulemoves N;

to the Pre-Game code, where N is the number of half-moves. (So by default N=100.)

I believe at one time there was a rule that in cases where the theoretical distance to forced mate was known, you got 1.5 times that number of moves, if this was more than 50. They stopped doing that when solutions for larger end-games were calculated, and sometimes would require hundreds of moves to force the win.

Whether it pays to increase the number of moves where a draw can be claimed depends on how important the affected end-games are for the variant. In general drawishness is seen as a bad thing, so you don't want to increase the number of draws by making frequently occurring endings that could have easily been won in a larger number of moves draws instead. OTOH you don't want to force players to play exhaustingly long games when their opponent is too stubborn to accept he cannot win.

On a larger board games are naturally longer to begin with, so one can assume these are played by patient players, who do not mind to spend a little more time in the late end-game. In Team-Mate Chess I increased the limit to 64 moves, even though it is just 8x8, because the 3-vs-1 end-games you could get in were the crux of the design. So I did not want those to be spoiled by too tight a limit. In orthodox Chess most games would end in KQK, and that can be won way faster than 50 moves. I am pretty sure the choice for a 50-move rule was based on 1.5 times the number of moves needed foor KBNK.