Ratings & Comments

Great! Thanks.

Ok, thanks. Now I understand. Like the Slip Bishop from the Seeping Switchers.

I finally finished playetesting the Silly-Sliders army with Fairy-Max, against the Fabulous Fides. Unfortunately the army is a bit too weak. As a whole it loses by about 58%. This is unacceptable, since all other established armies are sinificantly stronger than the Fides. The Onyxes are a bit stronger than their orthodox counterparts, the Bishops (even against the B-pair). The Lame Ducks and Rooks are equally strong. But the Squire is about half a Pawn weaker than a Queen, and the Diamond is also weaker than the Knight, probably because of its color binding. Although replacing it by a Frog (WH) only made it worse.

So I have been looking for ways to enhance the Squire. Making the diagonal moves reular ski-slides rather than lame ones made it too strong. On such a mobile piece it turns out to be of great value to be able to attack other pieces from behind a cover, so they canot attack you back. Only making the sideway orthogonal slides ski-slides made the armies about equal; it is difficult to attack from the side. But I don't like to break the 8-fold symmetry that all other pieces of the army have.

What is a good option is to add A or D moves to the Squire. The SiIlly Sliders then  beat the Fides by about 58%. I have not decided yet whether to use the A or D moves.

Ok, the j modification is a good idea then. FafmpafFafmpafafmpafF... is certainly not desirable :)

I'll get this implemented in ChessV. (The other two changes are not applicable - special rules like castling and en passant are not supported via XBetza.)

Any idea what these Grasshoppers are worth?

For aesthetic reasons I would  like to avoid divergent and asymmetric pieces. So if there is a 'full-atom' alternative, I would prefer that. And symmetry breaking would be preferable over divergence. (Because it is what the Nutters do. None of Betza's armies had divergence, though.) Tinkering with the super-piece is also less course than with pieces of which you have a pair.

A 58% result against FIDE is not out of line with what the other established armies do. (In fact they all have worse advantage.) One can also argue that in human play it is a good thing to disadvantage FIDE a bit, because of its familiarity. So I think A or D moves on the Squire are a satisfactory solution. And it doesn't alter the Squire's 'footprint'; it would still be a sliding version of a Squirrel.

It is just a matter of choosing between A and D, which appear to give an equal boost. The army already has D moves through the Diamond. So perhaps I should go for the A moves on the Squire; it seems to me the ability of pieces to attack each other without being automatically attacked back contributes a lot to making play interesting.

Can an editor (or the author himself) change the fmW* move for Pawn in the diagram definition to fmnW* ? Then I can drop the automatic assignment of e.p. capturability (i.e. without the n) for W* even for the first-defined piece in the diagram script. Apart from Wildebeest Chess (which was posted by me so that I can fix it myself) this was the only diagram I could locate that used the W* move.

What you say is true HG, it is a fact that different plays will quickly become all different in such a large variant. But so what?

Of course you are free to comment my proposal but I don't see where you want to go.

You argue about the fact that white has an advantage of having the word in saying what is the lineup. I'm still not convinced by your explanations, but I don't want to make a dispute on that. Since my sentence was not a rule and was more a comment, I removed it.

Anyway, advantage or not, I do like the idea of having the freedom to organise the major pieces at wish in the center of the board, even though those pieces are behind lines of pawns. When I play it, it adds some fun: either I choose the line-up or I do the first move. Like in some sports where either you choose the side on the field or the ball to start.

In any case, this game is not finished, and it might continue to evolve according to on-going play testing.

As I feared the Shatranjian Shooters are far too strong. I did some test games now with Fairy-Max, and with black they scored 76% against FIDE (100 games). With white they even scored 85% (50 games). The large white-black difference even suggests that theinitial position is not entirely quiet.

I also  did some tests with individual pieces. The War Elephant is slightly over half a Pawn stronger than a Queen. The Hero is much weaker than a Rook, however; a pair of those were totally annihilated by an army that had Rooks instead. But the Shaman is again much stronger than a Bishop, almost of Rook strength.

This army needs to be seriously weakened to make an acceptable CwDA army.

I am probably a bit late in commenting, but jAA has a meaning in Classic Betza notation (an Alfil-jumper-rider, i.e. a piece needing hurdles for each Alfil step it takes), and changing that meaning to something very ad-hoc is probably a bad idea. Either adding a new lowercase letter for slip-movement or attempting for a generic solution with different types of movement in the two legs of the move as in Betza's proposal t[FAA] would be better. Or new uppercase letters for the atoms slip-Rook and slip-Bishop.

HG, I initially thought the Shooters were too strong. Dropping the Shooters' queen analog to a DWAF should do much to reduce the Shooters' total value.

Question: Are you giving the Shooters' pawns an initial double step? If so, try taking that away for the Shooters and see what that does. That alone might cause a big reduction in Shooter overall value.

Fwiw, the symbology of the pieces 'describes' how they move, and it's at least internally consistent.

This is another army that gives FIDE a very bad beating (in Fairy-Max self play). The Unicorns are roughly a full Pawn stronger than a Rook. And since there are already two Rook-class pieces in the form of the Marquis, that give the Switchers an advantage of 5.5-6 Pawns. (Slip-Rook is indeed worth about a Knight.) Now the Slip Queen is of course worth less than a regular Queen, but it isn't worth that much less. (It beats a Unicorn by sinificantly more than a Pawn-odds score, which sugests its value is >= 7.5.) So the Switchers seem to have an advantage of about 3 Pawns on FIDE.

Per Joe's excellent suggestion, this thread is for discussion of other places on the web where chess variant enthusiasts explore, play, and discuss variants.

The first thing to mention is our menu item Web, where the most prominent and permanent of these should be promoted.

ChessArena.io

a multiplayer real-time (in the sense of "not turn-based", a la Kung Fu Chess) "io-style game". Beta version announced on reddit, direct link to game. I've wasted a bit of time on this one.

BullDog Chess

I've had trouble in the past tracking down concrete information here, but it seems to be a family of variants played by a group at Chess.com. The club's homepage.

ChessCraft

A phone-app game featuring customizable variant play. Active community on Discord, and a dedicated subreddit. Homepage.

Kung Fu Chess, the app

An app playing (a version of) Kung Fu Chess, including multiplayer matching (but rarely anybody free) or an AI opponent (not especially strong). I hesitate to mention this one, except that perhaps it will increase players and I can try it against a real person. It's also perhaps good practice for ChessArena. Play page.

I am attempting to verify my email for my account, but it seems that whenever I click on the link in the email, it just sends me to a change email form that doesn't verify the email. How can I fix this?

Looking at this page, Alfaerie Exp Set 4, no icons is displayed (I use Safari). Either it should be repaired or this page should be removed, if any editor find the time to do so.

This page has been restored. The file was deleted at some point.