Ratings & Comments

What about the continuation of the tournament? Are there any other games going on?

When the Cannon was introduced it could be called ground-breaking, because it introduced an entirely new class of moves: obligatory hopping over other pieces. Such moves are not as elementary as leaps, because they depend on occupancy of other squares than the origin and destination of the move. But one could already say that of sliding moves, which require all passed-over squares to be empty; the hoppers just impose another, more general condition than emptiness on such squares. Xiangqi is also somewhat unique in that it confines certain pieces to certain zones of the board; this could be seen as a special case of endowing pieces with location-dependent moves (namely scrapping precisely those moves that would leave the zone, in each location), which is very un-chess-like.

You are correct in pointing out the large Shogi variants are mostly just run-of-the-mill Chess variants, except for perhaps a hand full of innovative pieces (Lion, Hook Mover, Fire Demon.) But they still have a very different and easily recognized 'flavor': pieces tend to move only along the principal (orthogonal or diagonal) rays, and oblique leaps are almost completely absent. (And those that are there are then usually an incidental consequence of some multi-move rule, such as Lion = double-move King.) I have a theory that this is a consequence of the different Pawn move: the FIDE Pawn, capturing diagonally, tends to form chains of Pawns protecting each other. Which are very hard to break down by frontal attack once the chains interlock. You then need oblique leaps badly to be able to undermine these structures by attacking their weak spots in the rear, which are usually unreachable by Queen-moves only. And it doesn't matter much how few pieces you have that can make the move required in the case at hand, as the Pawn chains are quasi-static structures, and won't go away. So you will have enough time to manoeuvre the required piece into position. Shogi has none of this, as Pawns can never protect each other there (and after the invention of drops they added a rule for keeping it that way!). So there is no great need for oblique moves, and to get a large-enough variety of pieces with Queen-moves only, they turned to pieces with very low symmetry.

Another distinctive trait of the Shogi flavor is that virtually all pieces can promote (usually only with modest gain in abilities), while in western variants promotion is reserved for Pawns, offering the possibility to turn the weakest piece into the strongest one. In principle these traits could be easily mixed, but in practice this is not often done. Scirocco is a good example of a chess variant that combines design characteristics of Shogi and western chess variants.

But since the invention of the Cannon and the Grasshopper, and the introduction of asymmetric pieces, putting such moves on a piece in some combination that was never used before can no longer be called 'innovative'. There must be millions of such combinations possible even on an 8x8 board, and I am pretty sure the combination of moving diagonally forward like a Cannon, leaping like a Camel, and moving backwards like a Xiangqi Elephant (just to name something crazy) has never been tried. So what? Unless there is a very good reason why this move would make the game it appears in better than any other, 'inventing' the piece is not more creative than writing down a random number of 60 digits of which you can be virtually certain no one in the Universe has ever used (or even thought of) it before.

Truly innovative pieces are for instance Mats Winther's bifurcators, which generalize the principle of a hopper in various ways (by not only allowing change of move/capture rights on encountering an obstacle in their path, but also of the move direction, and the exact location where this change occurs). Inventors also often resort to associating a move with side effects to create something new, usually locust capture at squares that in various different ways can depend on the move (e.g. Advancers, Withdrawers), but also displacement of pieces on such squares (Magnetic or Catapult pieces).

I do not consider games like Ultima or Aarima chess variants at all. Even Paco Shako is a dubious case. Replacement capture is one of the defining traits of chess variants, and while it is OK to have the occasional exception (such as e.p. capture), a game that does (almost) entirely away with it no longer feels like chess at all. You might as well call Checkers, Ataxx or Amazons a chess variant. Clobber is a somewhat dubious case. 'Chess variant' is not a synonym for 'board game'.

No, the games are complete.  Was finishing the preset for Symmetric, and now I've been sick for almost a week so the preset is still unfinished and next round games are still unmade.  Hopefully soon.

Thanks for the lengthy reply H.G.; the explanation of shogi-like variants was a good reminder to me about those CVs.

One doubt I have though is that Ultima games normally at least include chess kings, and checkmating one is always at least one victory condition one can have in a given game, at least if we exclude something like Bombalot, which has no K, but is otherwise Ultima-like (so I'm not at all sure why I should reject them as CVs). This comes pretty close to what Fergus wrote about when he defined what a CV is (or is not), in the link I gave in my previous post in this thread. I can also imagine that some Ultima piece might be created (besides a chess king) that has (or has as an option) capture by displacement. Arimaa and checkers, on the other hand, are clearly not CVs, and indeed Fergus' article in the link I gave does single out checkers as not being a CV.

"Roberto Lavieri wrote on 2005-07-08 EDTExcellent ★★★★★

I don´t know how many users and members of TCVP have played this great game. I have only seen at brainking.com that Andreas has been an active Amazons player, with a good performance. The best rated Amazons player at brainking is Grim Reaper (Ed Trice) Total score: 269 wins, 17 draws, 0 losses. Impressively good score."

I (Kevin Pacey) am wondering how a draw is possible in a game of Amazons. Perhaps on brainking the players are allowed to agree to a draw, or one or both players noticed (too late) that both players' playing time on their clocks had elapsed, thus resulting in a draw that way(??)

Last year at the ICGA Computer Games Conference 'Computer Curling' was actually one of the big things. The attraction was that it was a game with a continuous rather than a discrete game state, which makes exhaustive listing of all possible moves impossible. I suppose that to make it difficult there must be some randomness added to the move that you specify, as with infinite precision there would be no difference between an easy and a difficult turn.

The odd/special pawn promotion rules of Courier-Spiel kind of remind me of the odd/special pawn-of-pawns promotion rules found in another (earlier) historic variant, Tamerlane Chess:

https://www.chessvariants.com/historic.dir/tamerlane.html

[edit: Also note that with the Centaur and Guard pieces chosen for Courier-Spiel, in the setup, for each side, there are 3 pieces with a guard-like component (king, centaur and guard) and 3 pieces with a knight-component (besides three with a bishop component and three with a rook component, thanks to the presence of a queen), though just 2 ferfils.]

I made a set, painted runes on back of some wooden Scrabble pieces. Painted board on some soft leather. Love the game. I might have just called it Odin's Chess, and I'd have opted for priests with some twist, but overall I like its uniqueness. It has a root chess feel but is very much a rebuild from that foundation.

Intresting,  I remember once thinking about an elliptical target for curling!...

Thanks for the info!... I hope your health improves!...

There is (was) a Zillions version which grasps the game and plays it brilliantly. I lost all initial games to it... Thanks for commenting.

Here's a (10x8) variant I stumbled onto that has castling rules somewhat similar to that of Wide Chess, in that a king may pass over squares under attack (though not finishing on such a square, nor is castling legal if the K is initially in check). So, a sort of precedent for (part of) the special fast castling rules used in Wide Chess (and subsequently in a number of other CVs I've invented since):

https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/21st-century-chess.html

Here's another sort of precedent, perhaps, in that in the following (12x12) CV, a king, if not in check, may (with its initial move only) leap to an unoccupied (& unattacked) square on its back two ranks (including possibly 'over' any attacked square)- though this does not include a change of position by a rook or any other piece, as part of the special leap process:

https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/quinquereme.html

Thanks for your reply, HG.

What I'm looking for is an engine or computer program that allows me to analyze Symmetric Chess games with the idea of publishing them on YouTube, for which it would be very useful to have teaching resources such as those before mentioned: arrows, highlighting squares, etc.  

I think I could use the Interactive Diagram but I feel a bit unpleasant the fact that on the starting setup appear Dragon Horses instead of Bishops. Would it be possible to implement the Bishops Convertion Rule without the intermediation of neither Dragon Horses nor Wazirs? 

That it takes so much effort even by seasoned chess programmers to create a rule-checking preset for a variant as simple as Symmetric Chess firmly puts us in the category of 'backward websites'. We really should have some kind of wizard for this, where people that cannot program at all would have no trouble to create such a preset. E.g. something like the Design Wizard for Interactive Diagrams I put in the article on those. Where you just have to take a minute or so to specify board dimensions and size of promotion zone, pick a preferred graphics theme, tick a number of pieces in a list of standard types (or, very rarely, pick an image and specify a non-standard move for it by hand), drag the pieces to their initial locations on an empty (a specified symmetry taking care of you having to do that for only one member of each type), and you are done.

If the wizard produces the usual game code, (just as that for the Interactive Diagrams produces the HTML), it will remain possible to take care of any features not suported through the wizard by editing the automatically generated game code later. But this should be needed only very rarely.

To catch more variants through the wizard it could allow a general input screen for specifying castling rules: the location of the castling partner, where it and the King will end up after castling, which squares must be empty and which squares must not be attacked. (And allow that to be repeated as many times as possible.)