Ratings & Comments

It will work correctly now. The coordinates stored for checking legal castling moves on for Black were on rank 8 instead of rank 10.

For what it's worth, here's a link to a CVP page showing games invented by one of the (possibly few) female members of CVP. Granted, the games may not reflect what the vast majority of female chess variant players might wish for in CVs that they would often play:

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php?type=Any&orderby=Type&displayauthor=1&displayinventor=1&inventorid=CBagleyJones&usethisheading=Items+Invented+by+Christine++Bagley-Jones

I tried again, and said 'yes' to making a move it had marked as illegal (my castling). After that, I was allowed to castle. So, apparently no fix to the preset is absolutely necessary.

The rule for deciding who moves first is no longer a part of this game, but I forgot to remove it from the Rules section. It has now been removed from both this page and the corresponding Game Courier presets.

I will add that I like the 8 stone chess idea.  Maybe the 8 stones (or however many you use) can be the job of the teammates.  One person gets the pieces, the other gets the stones.

Hello all you guys and hopefully gals.

A few weeks ago (February the 9th) I had encountered on the Facebook group here : https://www.facebook.com/groups/AbstractNationX/ the question if " Is there any dedicated team vs team abstract games? ".

Bughouse was given as example and a question has been risen whether bughouse and it's solitary counterpart crazyhouse. It has been argued that bughouse was designed to be a 2-player/team (4 players in total) game. I disagree. Bughouse is just regular chess shoved into two board with a shogi-like reuse rule!..

But we chess player do tend to get a weird/nerd/geek stamp in a "anti-good" way. And I wondered could I do it. Could I design such a game? Maybe aI could have had. But even most importantly many things needing improving in chess have crossed my mind.

Among them especially important is that chess and it's many variants are not female friendly designed. So that would be a second task.

But then I got so many ideas and then got blocked. It was clear. I can't do it on my own.

The discussion about nextchess is a very old, initial and dear to most on this website. So let's think about it together while crushing the quite unfair believe (ok, maybe a little fair) that chess players are not people persons. So together why not identify what next chess would require and design I propose a few nextchess variants together.

And by know ad-hoc skeptics would complain that it has been tried before: yara,yara,yara.

To that I leave you tto the explanations of someone who does it much better than I :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th5A6ZQ28pE

After this above link is well comprehended let me establish some initial ground rules.

1. Principles need to be established which will guide future conversation without having necessarily any obligatory ones nor the list should ever be closed.

2. The purpose of this post is to design a bughouse game (pair game) for 2 pairs that will benefit from designed goals aligned with this objective.

3. The second purpose (but as primary in importance) is to create a another such game with female friendly concepts in mind. I think a nice name for it would be ladybug.

4. The principles enumerated by Fergus in the link bellow are generally to be considered.

https://www.chessvariants.com/opinions.dir/fergus/design.html

5. Down bellow I will name a few high council member (like in the klingon empire- I know you know what I'm talking about) but most important try to bring into the fold as many people as they think this will matter.

 For starters I name to consider all this active members with a lot of lately contributions and quite interesting and different ideas : Fergus Duniho, Greg Strong, HG Muller, Vitya Makov, Kevin Pacey. I could have missed others though so please, everybody.

6. The ladybug game should be considered to be played on one larger board where partners could see eye to eye as opposite to stay shoulder by shoulder. It is proven that evolutionary speaking women communicate better this way where men communicate better in the later.

7. In order for that to work I propose for consideration that each member of a team should have it own color (although some pieces could change color adding a second way of giving - this time your own- pieces to your opponent). The inspiration for this was the game dada : https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/dada

8. stones like in 8 stones chess are an interesting addition. They would also provide interesting tactics and yet another way of giving pieces to your partner.https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/contest/eightstones.html

9. I engage to update the list from time to time as the discussion progresses

10. Most importantly Try to bring lady friends into this. We won't be able to properly do 3. otherwise

I would also prefer more alike games. Like with slightly different pieces (like I had done in my 2 apothecary games). For now this is it. I'm waiting for your feedback :)!

And in closing may I add two examples of game principles for orientative puropses as the above ones are rather general (7. & 8. are also game principles). Ex1. There should be a balance between leapers and riders. Ex2. Pieces that are blockable short range but have long range like the picket and giraffe from tamerlane chess are to be considered.

Definitely reverse the values of bishop and rook. I suppose the prohibtion on splitting the last king even to form another king is to limit the king's mobity, else last king facing capture could move as a split off a bishop and fuse with a rook all the  way accross the board. I wonder if this prohibition is needed for playabilty. My guess is that the case where my king is captured, I capute the enemy king, but opponent can't form a new king on the next turn would be a draw. I think I would prefer the simpler rule "a player who has no king at the start of his turn loses."

That information was already there in the Notation section. I tweaked it a little to make it clearer.

Someone on wikipedia added the name Nao for a piece that moves like the Nightrider version of the Cannon. Does anyone know if this name actually was sourced from a chess variants book or was made up?

Awesome, thanks for the quick fix!  I figured it had to be related to the unusual way that castling with a single-space king move was triggered.

I would also suggest updating the mini-rules shown on that page to indicate the king's castling options and how to trigger the single-space castle by moving the rook on top of the king.  I would have thought that such a move was unlikely to ever come up in real play, but in this game I had definite reasons for wanting to castle that way.

(video provided was from an outdated ruleset)

When I looked over the time controls before, I didn't notice the thing about the 4 moves per week pace. I had previously modified the invitation script to not include the option of setting a pace in the time controls, but I forgot about doing the same thing in the script for defining a round. The code is kept in Game Courier for backwards compatibility with games that still use it, but I do not recommend its use. Here is how it works. I have added some extra comments to better explain things.

// As long as you keep the desired pace, your reserve time is kept from falling below $sparetime.
// $i is the turn being checked. $i & 1 returns 0 or 1 to identify the player.
if ($timeleft[$i & 1] < $sparetime) {
    // Total time that has passed from beginning of game
    $timepassed = ($timestamps[$i] - $timestamps[0]);
    // If average duration for a move is less than the set duration for a move,
    // then moves are being made faster than required,
    // and $timeleft is raised to value of $sparetime.
    // Equivalent to -> if ((($timepassed / 2) / $i) < ($paceperiod / $pacefreq)) 
    // but loses no precision and avoids division by zero error
    if ((($timepassed / 2) * $pacefreq) < ($paceperiod * $i))
        $timeleft[$i & 1] = $sparetime;
    }
}

One problem with this is that it divides the time passed by 2, which is accurate only when each player takes exactly as long to move as the other player. It would be more accurate to count up how much time each player has individually used. So, it will normally reward both players or neither player, depending on how fast the game is moving along. It does not account for individual variation in playing speed. Because it divides time passed by two, the pace it checks for is actually half as fast as the pace specified. So, if the pace is 4 moves per week, it will reward players for moving twice a week. Without knowing how it works, you might imagine that it will enforce a certain pace. It will not do that. It will just reward players for keeping a minimum pace. When combined with other time controls that already reward players for moving quickly, it may help inflate how much time players have left. With the pace set to 4 moves per week, it will be possible to play slow, leisurely games that will take many months.

On the mindsports website, the 4 corner squares are said to be untiled

Fergus,

Something strange is going on with the comments at least on this page.  When you view What's New, you see everything.  When you launch the tournament page, however, you only see a few comments (which is normal) but they are not the most recent.

And yes, tomorrow, Sunday the 3rd :)