Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Sam Trenholme wrote on Sun, Aug 11, 2013 01:05 AM UTC:
While Schoolbook is probably still a variant worth playing, when H.G. Muller gave us a free Capablanca Chess engine with decent strength, I discovered that the game is unbalanced in favor of White because of 1. c4! I spent weeks trying to find a decent Black reply to that opening move without success. I have put Schoolbook on the shelf until someone finds better defenses for Black.

As I recall, I did test the Gothic Chess setup with Muller's program and it appeared to really favor White. I never liked the Gothic setup because of how the Knights are so far out on the flanks and how moving the center pawns forward two squares blocks the bishops.

Before I gave up chess variants, my research shows that the Modern Carrera opening setup: RANBQKBNMR, where "A" is the Knight + Bishop Faerie piece and "M" is the Rook + Knight Faerie piece appears to be more balanced. Of course, there may not be a Capa opening setup without a big advantage for White on account of how much power is on the board. Carrera Chess has been around almost as long as Chess itself (Carrera, Bird, Capablanca, Grand Chess on a 10x10 board, Gothic, and most recently Seirawan Chess on the 8x8 board) and has never caught on...but, quite frankly, that's true of pretty much any western Chess variant with the possible exception of Bughouse Chess.

In terms of the En Passent argument I had, the club in question was not a Chess club. It was a casual social club -- something that has sadly gone out of style with the Internet taking over everything -- where people usually played card games. There were only three of us there who ever joined the USCF or went to a real Chess club.

I have been working hard the last few days hunting on the Internet for any and all Zillions files still extant out there for me to preserve. I have been unable to get a Zillions rule file for Polgar Star Chess; if anyone has a copy of it, please send it to me for hosting on my Zillions archive.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Zillions-of-Games: Review

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.