Comments by ChessShogi

Okay, so maybe I was a bit harsh on the conquer rule, and in hindsight lost sight of my review process...what can I say, human beings are strange sometimes.

Overall, the page looks good.

Queens without the conquer rule has been played many times on Game Courier and has always come to checkmate or one side has resigned. Queens with the conquer rule will be no different.

You'd be surprised at how much a simple rules change can affect a game. Take Annan Shogi. It adds only one new rule - that if the moving pieces has a friendly piece directly behind it, it moves as that piece instead of itself. This doesn't sound like much, but it changes the game so much that the setup is changed and other rules are relaxed or tweaked to account for it.

While the conquer mechanism is interesting, the perpetual capture problem definitely holds it back a lot in terms of playability. The reason normal Queens works is because the pieces get removed from the game after being captured. Because this is not the case in the conquer version, and the flipped pieces is on the origin square, it is very easy for pieces that move alike to perpetually capture one another, making the conquer mechanism very drawish as it is now.

This mechanism might work with piece rosters with a lot of forward bias (e.g. Shogi), but this idea is untested.

This is rather intriguing.

Just a thought, but it would probably work better to either:

• Have all pieces on the same color
• Have two Kings, one for each color, and only require one of them to be checkmated to win.

This is since only half the army can reach the enemy King in the current version, and would be quite drawish if that half got depleted.

The page works quite well in presentation though.

Also, when you modify a page, if you change the Modification date in its metadata so that it is more recent, you can push it closer to the top of the Unprocessed Submissions list.

This page looks good enough to be approved.

The rules may be slightly unclear in some places, but overall they are clear enough that approval is warranted.

Okay, it works now.

As for the Navigational panel, it's not a huge deal, but it just seemed weird to me that those buttons were missing.

It should be fixed.

But the file may be in a cache. Press [ctrl] + f5 to force js reloading?

I'll give it a while.

I have not played this game personally, but I must say, for a multi-move variant, this game was very well-made.

Also, the new circle symbol in GC for past moves is very nice. However, this functionality doesn't seem to work with hexagonal boards (like Hex Shogi 91's).

I changed them to sort by ModifiedDate instead of CreationDate. However, since the revisions and comments are in separate tables of the database, the ModifiedDate will probably not reflect the last action taken.

It may not be ideal, but it's a right improvement.

Edit: This is probably the best possible ordering with the tools we have now.

I have revised all the rules and they look fine to me. I don't know what else to add. Please let me know if there is anything else. I know, the rules of this game seem to be out of this world, but please give it a chance.

I think the problem here isn't so much that the game is bad. I think it's a brilliant concept that mixes the randomness of something like Banqi with the rules of Chess.

The main problem I have with this submission, more than anything else, is that at least some of the rules are poorly communicated. From what I have seen, this is easily the number one reason new submissions don't get approved.

To (hopefully) make your life easier, I will give you the following advice:

• Make use of the Help menu at the top of the page. It is there for a reason!
• Listen to the Editors. The Editors have a lot of experience with Chess variants, oftentimes much more so than the average author. Its the reason Fergus gives the Editors these powers in the first place - he trusts us to use them as well as our expertise to help other authors get their pages published, and not abuse them in the process. So please, don't discount an Editor's opinion just because you think it is wrong.
• Study published pages made other authors. This will give you a benchmark to work from, so you have a better idea of what your submissions should do, which will be helpful not just for this submission, but for all your future submissions as well.
  • Learning the basics of technical writing helps. That's technical, not creative writing.
• Keep it simple, where possible. If you complicate your description of rules too much, you will eventually hit a tipping point where the act of understanding the rules becomes more trouble than its worth. I'm not really sure what to say to fix this...just stop trying so hard.
  • If the point of the game is to be complicated, such as in Bob's Unnecessarily Complicated Chess or Taikyoku Shogi, you'll have to strike a balancing act where the complexity doesn't cross that threshold.
• Keep your terminology consistent. This allows players to quickly refer to something they need help with. If there is any deviations, these should be hammered out.
• Make use of graphics. There's a reason the best pages on this site make use of graphics all over the place. For piece graphics, you should have at least one distinct image for each distinct piece that appears in the game somewhere on the page.
  • A good idea would be to add an image of a solid white or black circle for the Black Swan on this page, so players have an idea of what it looks like.
• Learn some HTML/CSS/JS. Even a basic understanding of the way HTML works will benefit you greatly here, as it will give you way more control over how your page looks. There are guidelines on what you should do when using HTML, see HTML Dos and Don'ts for more details on this.

@Fergus:

Would it be possible for us to order the pages listing Members-Only and WIP submissions by the date of the last action taken on them (creation, revision, comment, etc.) by the author? By pushing pages with the most recent actions to the top, it would greatly improve quality-of-life for the Editors who focus on reviewing submissions, as it would allow us to more easily see which pages the authors genuinely want reviewed, and which ones are just sitting on the site doing nothing (much of the stuff from 2022 and prior, and especially from 2021 and prior, does this).

My gut feeling is that it shouldn't be too hard, but I am not yet fluent enough in SQL to do this by myself yet.

I think the 64-move rule could be operational now(not tested).

From my testing it took 62 moves to reach a long game draw, so either you are slightly off. or I may have miscounted.

I did find the line of code you will need to update.

In hectochess-chess-model.js it is this block of code:

				// check 50 moves without capture
				if(this.noCaptCount>=100) {
					this.mFinished=true;
					this.mWinner=JocGame.DRAW;					
				}

It should be changed to this:

				// check 64 moves without capture
				if(this.noCaptCount>=128) {
					this.mFinished=true;
					this.mWinner=JocGame.DRAW;					
				}

As for the size of the promotion panel, I can’t change it easily, but as the number of large pieces is not limited, I can't see a situation where a bishop, rook or knight would be chosen, so the question arises of keeping them or not.

I would keep the Rook, Bishop, and Knight, for consistency reasons.

Hectochess has been out too long for me to change this. Several other programs, such as ChessV, and Ai Ai, have implemented this game, and I suspect that all of them allow these promotions.

I have renamed the Queen to Beast, which I think is pretty fitting, since the piece is basically halfway between Queen and Amazon.

The only problem I can find (which probably isn't that big of a problem in the first place, but may still be worth fixing) is that it takes 50 moves w/o moving Pawns or capturing to draw in the implementation, whereas Hectochess increase that threshold to 64 due to the increased board size.

Apart from that, everything works properly.

My my, what have we here? A variant so out of the box and original while also staying mostly true to Chess. A brilliant idea with a lot of potential. Of course, there are kinks, so lets get into those.

Each player has 18 pieces.

Perhaps a list explaining how many of each piece?

• Pieces that move orthogonally (Queens and Rooks) are not allowed to be placed next to the reserved squares in the next few moves. This is to allow for both Kings the chance to come into the game. 
• If too many "reserved squares" are under attack by pieces of the same color, players have to make sure that at least one square per King is "safe"(not under direct attack). 
• When placing Pawns on the board, they also have to block eventual attacks on Kings coming from across the board. 
• Long range pieces (Queens, Rooks, and Bishops) have to be placed on the board in such a way that at least two "reserved squares" are safe for placing the Kings. 
• Short range pieces (Knights and Pawns) will have to balance the board against too much control of the long range pieces. 

Perhaps a better way of doing the setup would be to place the two Kings straight away, and then go from there, keeping each army on its own half of the board.

A problem that I quickly noticed is that after setup it may be possible for White or Black to win in a single move (example, in the last diagram White can play Qxh3#).

The board looks better but there is a weird anomaly in the pattern on the last two ranks from White's perspective, which makes it so that two of the rows appear to be merged into a single row, and that Black's white corner square is on the left.

The other problems are all fixed (including King and Queen setup).

As for castling, it shouldn't be too hard to program...I hope.

P.S. I think your update broke the Werewolf Chess image on the dashboard, just so you know.

Yes, the icon will probably be changed.

Okay, the link is fixed. However, it goes to the games dashboard instead of the implemetation itself. I checked, and I didn't see Hectochess listed (or maybe I missed it); however, I did find the implementation's URL.

I have inspected the Hectochess implementation, and it is quite stellar, but there are a few mistakes to fix, which should be pretty easy:

• Black's kingside Knight and Champion have been switched (Champion should be next to the Rook, and Knight should be next to the Bishop)
• White's promotion zone is two ranks too far forward. It should be at the farthest rank.
• A King should be able to castle two or three squares to either side. Currently, the implementation only allows the latter.
• Your board has the white corner square on the left (it should be on the right). Because of this, you ended up swapping the King and Queen (from White's perspective, Queen should be on left side, and King on right side).

Also, some things worth mentioning:

• Hectochess uses a 64-move rule instead of a 50-move rule, due to the increased board size.
• Since there are so many Pawn promotions, it may be beneficial to split the options into two rows or have scrolling on the promotion dialog.