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Claustrophobia Chess. game is lost if King has no space to move.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Thomas wrote on Wed, May 6, 2020 12:47 PM UTC:

It seems to me that the rules need clarification with respect to stalemate. It is easy to create ambiguities when messing with the king rule :/

The basic idea of this variant is to enhance the king rule. After a side moved, not only must their king be not attacked, but there must also be a square next to the king not attacked by the opponent and not occupied by a friendly piece.

The game ends if a side cannot make a legal move. Here this means: if there is no pseudolegal move which fulfils both demands of the enhanced king rule. Then it is either checkmate and the opponent wins, or it is stalemate and the game is a draw.

In orthodox chess, checkmate is when the king of the side to move is threatened, i. e. attacked. But here, the concept of the king being threatened may be enhanced, as the enhanced king rule suggests: the king is threatened if one of the two demands of the king rule is not fulfilled. That would mean that stalemate does no longer exist. If both demands are fulfilled, i.e. the king is not threatened, then the king has a square to move to and there is a legal move (because the king is, after the move, adjacent to the square he just moved away from so that the second demand is again fulfilled).

But one could also stay with the usual definition of "threatened". Then, if the king is not attacked and has no square to move to and no other piece can legally move, it would be stalemate and a draw.

The former appeals more to me, and I'm going to clarify the rules accordingly.

BTW the "adjacent to queen" rule is also interesting, it would solve the problem of black being checkmated at the very beginning of the game. But it is not really necessary. I want to keep it as simple as possible and just declare the beginning of the game an exception.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Sun, May 3, 2020 10:03 AM UTC:

I wonder how this rule would go allong with the 2 kings of spartan chess!


Greg Strong wrote on Sat, May 2, 2020 10:08 PM UTC:

Interesting idea.  I would guess this also means that there is no stalemate.

The rules say that the player must end his turn such that his king has a square to escape to or he loses.  Stalemate is the condition of beginning a turn this way.  I assume this has the same outcome, although the rules don't explicitly say it.

A possible variant, which would free the players from needing to push d, e, or f pawns on the first move, would be to say that the king is comfortable so long as the queen is present (on an adjacent square.)  He's not nervous as long as the powerful queen is there, but when she's gone, he becomes paranoid and requires a space to retreat to.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2020 08:02 PM UTC:

I have now published this page with slight corrections for grammar, a link for Chess, and some capitalization of piece names.


💡📝Thomas wrote on Sun, Apr 26, 2020 05:37 PM UTC:

I have added the content now.

Some time ago I started to create the page but cancelled it because I wanted to think again about the rules. But somehow the page was created anyways.


🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Mon, Apr 20, 2020 05:19 PM UTC:

This page has nothing on it. If nothing more is written here within a month, I will delete this page.


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