Ratings & Comments

But with shuffle.

@François Houdebert,

I saw your Jocly implementation for Chu Seireigi. It works much better than it used to.

I went through and tested everything, and here is a comprehensive list of all known errors that I found:

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Piece Movement/Promotion Errors
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Ram's-Head Soldier and Prancing Stag are not forced to promote when reaching the last rank (these pieces must promote on last rank)

Strong Bear (Starting and Promoted) still has its old move (should move one square diagonally or sideways)

Whale is missing its forward orthogonal step

Flying Swallow is not forced to promote when reaching the last two ranks (this piece must promote on last two ranks)

White Golden Bird is missing its sideways orthogonal leaps, Black Golden Bird is missing its (1,-2) leap from White's perspective

Kirin promotes to Lion (should promote to Bishop) and White Kirin moves has extra (2,2) leap in all directions (should move as in Chu Shogi)

Phoenix promotes to Queen (should promote to Rook)

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Board Setup Errors
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There currently aren't enough spaces in the hand to accommodate all the droppable piece types (there are 19 in total). You will need a second column of hand spaces on each side to account for this.

Black Running Leopard and Black Running Wolf are swapped from where they should be in the initial setup.

This Thread is about games that contain the joker(imitator, jester, fool) piece. The joker piece is here a piece that does not have a move of it's own but borrows the last move of the opponent. It has no other abilities (unlike the one in omega chess), not even double pawn move, en passant or promotion, ability to castle etc. .

The main problem I am facing is that with increased number of piece types (which comes naturally on larger boards) it becomes increasingly powerful. I fear it becomes game breaking. I'm stuck in designing my new games as this piece is also difficult to program (more on this later). Each of the games I am designing has a heavy cavalry piece pair and a light cavalry piece (leapers- their exact abilities are not important now), a bishop pair, a rook pair, a war wagon (as I have renamed the well known falcon), a bent rider, a leaper+slider compound, a queen and of course the royal king. What I have observed by playing against the interactive diagram is that after some pawns and minors are exchanged the joker finds rather easily a central or near central position where it seems almighty. True that the opponent has a joker, too, but it is quite often when one joker paralyzes more pieces than the other. So to me it seems that the joker inserts in the game more a random thing than a good strategy reward. I have to mention that in orthodox chess I have a 1500 rating after the recent increase. Probably stronger players will feel differently. I though of having instead of one all imitating joker to have one that has it's power updated when the enemy moves a light piece and one that has it's power updated when the opponent moves a heavy piece. But this makes a game that already has a steep learning curve into something with an even greater learning curve. I'm writing this in hope for new opinions about including joker in increasingly large games.

On the programming side of things, games that have jokers are more difficult to program. And not because it's move power is difficult to program. I was able to go myself as far, but not further. It is a piece extremely difficult to evaluate. It has been proposed here to aproximate the piece value with the average strength of the enemy pieces. But this does not do it justice. The number of enemy piece types should play a role especially in games where there are many types of piece types like in those I'm designing as mentioned above (riders, leapers, pathers, leapers+riders, bent riders etc.). Moreover chessV does not accept a joker imitating a war wagon (falcon). Some I'm stock only with the interactive diagram which is a poorer AI. I know HG works on something cooler in C++ if I'm not mistaking but this could take many months maybe years.

More I'm thinking of a 10x10 CWDA with jokers. But imitating an opponent's move does not seem like CWDA to me. So I'd go for a transferrer that trasfers the move of a fibnif to a waffle for example. All of these are reasons for why I'm contemplating to take out the joker and replace it with a more normal piece.

But I have reserves to doing that also. First as I have said above I am a merely 1500 chess player. What if introducing the joker is brilliant but I just can't see it. What I find random it is actually strategic for a better player. A NNUE program for example. Also the joker is fun and it offers many tactical possibilities.

For now the best course of action seems to me to make simulations with ChessV without a joker, say jokerless varaints of the variant. That to find out the real piece values when the joker is not involved. An then when HG's more sofisticated program becomes available, try to look at games with joker (never jokers, as many jokers also make each joker more powerful) and see if having a joker makes the games more strategic and tactical, or it makes the game feel more random.

@SYG: "is it possible to perform a Bishop switch maneuver TWICE? ". The answer is in the short text: "The player would have four ways to do the adjustment, but he is only allowed to do it one time throughout the game".

Restart to shuffle Knaves and Diamonds.

When I first saw this game, I didn't think much of it, since I was more focused on larger Shogi variants, especially Tenjiku Shogi. However, now I have a few games against Jocly under my belt, and wow, this game completely blew me away. It is an absolute joy to play, despite its size and complexity (which melts away after a couple games). However, it is not flawless.

The Lion-trading rules are a bit complex, and making the Lion contagious (Like Maka Dai Dai Shogi's Deva, Dark Spirit, and their promoted forms) would make the rule much simpler while also achieving the same effect. However, this isn't really much of a problem, and may in fact be the better choice.

The real problem that I have with this game is that modern "innovations" have made the game more complicated than it needs to be. The repetition rules are quite complex, so much so that most computer programs for Chu Shogi that I know don't implement them, which is a trait borrowed from Xiangqi. The King Baring rule is completely unnecessary, as it does not add anything to the game that the combined effects of the other rules do not achieve. There is no evidence that it existed in the Edo period, so I'm not sure why someone thought it would be a good idea to mention this.

However, despite these problems, Chu Shogi is still easily among the best games of its kind. If you like Chess variants, you should give it a try.

Chu Seireigi combines elements of Chu Shogi with the ruleset of modern Shogi. It also has the benefit of not needing any special rules to preserve its quality, fixing all the problems with the modern "innovations" for Chu Shogi that I mentioned above. Players are disincentivized from trading off the Lions in many cases because they would just go into the player's hands, making them even more dangerous. The repetition rule is simply that of Shogi (draw, except perpetual check loses), and the drops make King-baring extremely rare. However, this comes with the unfortunate downside of having to remove the multi-move and orthogonal step from the Lion's move, as otherwise, it would be too strong, even if only the multi-move was removed. To compensate for this, the Lion also moves as a Bishop (in effect making it a Bishop+Squirrel compound).

269. Limping Bishop, 270. Limping Rook, and 271. Limping Queen. This was not what I'd planned for today, but Thingiverse is having some technical issues with adding new parts, so I'm going with these.

After seeing many variations on sliders -- ski, skip, slip, spotted, and so on -- I've seen skips of one or two spaces, either one-time or repeated; and I thought, what if a piece had to move three spaces at a time? Well, it wouldn't be much use, I decided; but two out of three seemed viable.

These "Limping" pieces can only move a number of spaces that's either a multiple of 3, or 1 greater than a multiple; in other words, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, and so forth. The Limping Bishop, therefore, is afaf(afafaf)FnGG, while the Limping Rook is afaf(afafaf)WnHH.*

In a way, it resembles a skipping step, and I'd call these "Skipping" pieces if that wasn't already taken.

And, obviously, the Limping Queen combines the two moves. (afaf(afafaf)KnSS)

These models are the first time I've sliced open the bases of my pieces, and (from the looks of that Bishop) I think I may need to check them and fill them in.

And of course there are two other possibilities for which step out of three to skip over; they just need good names!

*As H. G. Muller points out in a reply to this, the logical way to write these would be [F?nGG]nGG and [W?nHH]nHH, but as of this moment bracket notation doesn't handle certain things -- such as those combinations -- correctly. (Yet.)

The squire jumps 1 space forward, then 1 space diagonally forward

Does this mean the squire can't jump if a piece is directly in front of it?

Information I have on this piece is ...

G. P. Jelliss invented a game called 'Twenty-First Century Chess' in 1991. In this game there is a piece that moves as a Bishop and Nightrider. Also in this game is a piece that moves as Rook and Nightrider.

See 'Variant Chess 6' April-June 1991, page 70. (This is a different game from Karl Munzlinger's game of the same name).

Unsure when he first invented the actual name 'Banshee', but the piece is there in his game. Dang it, now I'll have to research when he first used the name!! Link to how you can see 'Variant Chess 6' and other chess publications here ..

https://www.mayhematics.com/p/p.htm

edit>>> See this link here, by George Jelliss in 2002, 'Variant Chess Games' where the game is described and the name 'Banshee' is used (and 'Raven' for Rook + Nightrider) for his 1991 game. Look under 'T' for 'Twenty-first Century Chess'.

https://www.mayhematics.com/v/gg.htm#A

Someone told me that unicorn day is today.

266. Crossing Bishop. and 267. Crossing Rook. I had been going to do something else today, but then I realized that tomorrow's going to be pretty busy for me*, so I'd be better off putting up a pair for today and tomorrow. Tune in Thursday for what had been going to be today's.

The Crossing Bishop was first proposed by Ralph Betza in his article on Bent Riders. This piece steps one space diagonally like a Ferz, then turns 90° to slide like a Bishop. ([F?sB])

It's fairly easy to extrapolate a Crossing Rook from that, as stepping one space like a Wazir, then turning 90° to slide like a Rook. ([W?sR])

Other Crossing pieces are possible too, of course; the Crossing Queen would combine these two, while there could also be a Crossing Nightrider, Crossing Camelrider, Crossing Raven, and so forth.

*I'm going out of town for eye surgery.

the Jocly implementation can no longer handle pawn advance in i7.

Do you think there's a way to restore the previous behaviour? It seems to me that it used to detect the threat of the flying bishop before...

263. Punk Bishop, 264. Punk Rook, and 265. Punk Queen. These are all extension of the Punk Knight earlier this week, though it was figuring out the moves for these that gave me the move for the Punk Knight.

The Punk Bishop slides diagonally like an orthodox Bishop, but does not capture at its destination square. Instead, it captures at the first square it passes through, and/or the square just before its destination. (mB[cF-fmB?fcF][cB-fmF])

In this illustration, the White Punk Bishop can capture the Black Knight and move as far as the corner, or the Black Rook and land on the space just beyond; or it can capture both the Black Pawn and Black Bishop. The Black King is not in check, because there's no space beyond it for the White Punk Bishop to land on.

The Punk Rook does the same thing, but orthogonally. (mR[cW-fmR?fcW][cR-fmW])

The White Punk Rook's situation here is similar to the Punk Bishop's above. Note the empty space between the Black Pawn and Black Rook here; if there was another piece there, the Punk Rook would be unable to move in that direction.

The angle on the Punk Rook doesn't quite show the spikes properly, but there's enough there to give you the idea.

Of course (anticipating Monday), the Punk Queen combines the moves of these two.

The "floppy ears" is an optical illusion on the white one only. Similarly, the black one has an illusion of a Bishop-like cleft. Neither is a major problem with the others present. However, I'd agree with taking out that ridge across the front.

Otherwise, I absolutely prefer this model of yours, Jean-Louis. It's probably the best-done Centaur model yet, from anyone.

Edit: My comment crossed paths with your second attempt, which is much better. In fact, it's as near to perfect as I could imagine.

I have imagined new pieces now, ideal for your weekend pair.

Black Vulture (Ski-Bishop+Condor), Peregrine Falcon (Ski-Rook+Osprey).

Also, to fit the theme; I’ve suddenly looked at my notebook, seen thin points and imagined ambiguous Fighting Cockerel (cKfW or obscene vice-versa). Like pawn but not pawn.

another remark concerning makromachy: jocly no longer detects the threat of a flying bishop attack in n9, for example:

1. h4-h7 h11-h8 2. i4-i6 Sg12-i10 3. Sh3-n9+ This must be a side effect, because it seems to me that he was seeing the threat before.

@Bob: I'm sure you won't stop there. I look forward for your Rasta Knight, Rasta Bishop (!), etc.