Ratings & Comments

I think this variant has a design flaw. In orthodox Chess a Pawn protected by a Pawn is basically unassailable for any piece, except that Pawns can still successfully capture it (i.e. without losing material). But here that is no longer true: capturing a P protected by a P makes the latter promote in the recapture. This makes it too difficult to break down Pawn chains.

Maka Dai Dai Shogi, from which the promotion-on-capture rules were borrowed does not have this problem: the Pawns there are Shogi Pawns, rigorously bound to their file, so that Pawns can never protect each other. With FIDE Pawns the rule do not work so well, though.

One way to repair this would be to replace the FIDE Pawns with Shogi Pawns. This violates the spirit of the design, however, which was to use promotion-on-capture in a FIDE context.

An alternative would be to make PxP a special case, in which no promotion can take place. Other pieces capturing a P could still promote, as could a P capturing another piece.

I don't know what happened after I submitted my last move but, although the log seems to be broken, it can be restored by clicking on the small rectangle below the promotions menu.

It seems that the sissa-arx-2020-246-116 log is broken, however I happened to discover a strange way to recover it by clicking on the small rectangle below the promotions menu.

fixed

I had tried that before and had trouble defining moves or promotion or something, but I just tried again and was able to make it work. Thanks!

There is no reason why an AI should never castle without book. I am pretty sure that the included Fairy-Max and KingSlayer engines would castle very quickly. I don't know about ChessV's intrinsic AI, but if it never castles it means the evaluation can easily be improved. In KingSlayer the castling is driven by a bonus for having a King near a corner behind a Pawn shield.

I guess that conventional chess AIs (i.e. not the alpha-zero type neural networks) are always mostly tactical.

Have you tried generating the GAME code with the Play-Test Applet? This should have no problem with a castling where the King ends at the Rook location. (As of today; I noticed there was a bug there in taking back the castling, because the Rook and King were put back in the wrong order, so that the King would turn into a Rook during the legality test.) I temporarily changed the castling rule in the Mighty-Lion preset to do 3 King steps, and this works fine even for K-side castling.

Having used a lot of Zillions, I really like this interface, and the fact that a few extra engines come pre-installed. Zillions is all tactics, but I don't think these engines are.

AI never castles, but it probably wouldn't without an opening book, and making 100 opening books seems a bit much :o

Everything I would want in western chess variants, but I hope someday someone will add Asian variants. That someone might be me if I can find enough time.

well i do not know i like it this way but if you have a better idea how to change it im all ears Also did you guys played my game or just checked out the rules and thats all if you guys played it how was it?

For some reason the Diagram does not recognize the keyword 'royal' in the line royal=8. (And as a consequence considers the Rex the only royal piece.) I suspect there is some unprintable character in front of it, like <tab> or <cr>, because when I copy-paste your diagram description from the Page Source to a page on my own computer, everything works fine. (The Diagram script does strip leading spaces.)

Just delete that line, and retype it by hand, and it should work.

http://jdh.hamkins.org/tag/infinite-chess/

Note that to make the Diagram play this according to your rules, you would have to specify additional parameters

royal=8
royal=9
extinction=0
baring=0

Otherwise it would assume the Rex is the only royal piece (because you mentioned that last). Or assume you would have to capture both of them to win. Finally, baring=0 indicates that losing all non-royal pieces also counts as a loss.

Apparently that wasn't as easy as I thought since it didn't detect whether the king would pass through check from new pieces, which I also don't know how to fix.

EDIT

I think I found a solution by modifying the fairychess castling subroutine to move the king and rook one space over after castling. It highlights the h2 and h9 squares for moving to instead of i2 and i9 but it works.

Hello, I know I'm already posting too many comments on this, I just wanna fix the game

While currently playtesting the game on Zillions, I'm thinking of ideas to try weaken the riders so that the game's more "fair" or smth

I'm thinking of making it a part-hopper, limit their range, or replace them entirely but I dunno yet, I just need ideas to weaken them

EDIT: ok, instead of "fixing" the riders, I'm going to try to update the rules

Thank you!

I'm trying to figure out how to get the castling rules enforced properly. I really don't understand what I'm doing. Based on this preset https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Expanded+Chess&settings=default I managed to include the fischer file and make the proper castling moves display as legal, but when I try to actually castle it says You cannot capture your own pieces. I think this has something to do with the post move sections but I'm totally lost trying to understand what needs to be changed.