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Comments by Greg Strong
Quinquereme Chess. Large variant with a new piece, the Quinquereme. (12x12, Cells: 144) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Jul 8, 2004 05:35 PM UTC:I think that there are a significant number of people who play Tenjiku Shogi, which is 16x16. In that game, however, each player has 2 Fire Demons which constantly 'burn' all enemy pieces on the eight adjacent squares, and it has quite a range, so the game has some very voilent openings with mass casualty. Maybe that helps to make it more playable.
ChessV
. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jul 11, 2004 01:01 AM UTC:New version posted. Now also plays Extinction Chess, Berolina Chess, and Kinglet Chess. Also added and corrected numerous little things.
Chaturanga. The first known variant of chess. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Mon, Jul 12, 2004 09:26 PM UTC:<p>I am implementing this game for ChessV, but am unclear about the pawn promotion. It says that a pawn can only promote to a specific type, and only if a piece of that type has been captured. So what if no piece of that type has been captured? The pawn moves to that square and stays there forever? or stays there until a piece of that type is captured? or just disappears? or isn't even allowed to move to the eigth rank in the first place? And does this apply to the E1 and D8 squares?
<p>And I'm probably reaching here, but anyone know if there was a repetition rule?
Switching Chess. In addition to normal moves, switch with an adjacent friendly piece. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Jul 15, 2004 09:26 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★This is a really neat one! I wonder, though, how this changes the value of the pieces!?! A bishop can now change color. Maybe that makes the bishop better than the knight. But then again, one of the problems with the knight is that it must change color when it moves; I guess that is no longer true, either. And the pawns had the least mobility to begin with, so they benefit most, yes? And that brings down the value of all the other pieces, since they are all relative to the pawn...
Greg Strong wrote on Sat, Jul 17, 2004 11:17 PM UTC:It might be worth considering a rule that you can't switch your way out of check. Hiding behind your pawns on the eigth rank can't get you into trouble here, and that's no fun! :) In fact, switching makes it much harder to inflict checkmate, so games will last longer. This rule-change would help mitigate that.
Abstract Chess. Pieces are represented by stacks of different heights.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Wed, Jul 21, 2004 03:28 PM UTC:This game is very interesting. It does look like the knight is a heck of a value at only 2 stones. I would make 14 Knights and a Rook. I bet that would be hard to deal with!
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Jul 22, 2004 01:14 AM UTC:<p>ChessV version 0.4 posted to sourceforge:<br>
<a href='http://sourceforge.net/projects/chessv'>http://sourceforge.net/projects/chessv</a></p>
<p>Added support for the following games:
<ul><li><a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/diffmove.dir/switching.html'>Switching Chess</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/cylindrical.html'>Cylindrical Chess</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/historic.dir/chaturanga.html'>Chaturanga</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/historic.dir/shatranj.html'>Shatranj</a></li>
<li><a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/historic.dir/courier.html'>Courier Chess</a></li></ul></p>
<p>Added many user-interface features, including changing colors of the board squares and the pieces, and selecting from multiple piece sets. Support for <a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/graphics.dir/abstract/index.html'>Fergus Duniho's Abstract Graphics Set</a> has been added. Also, settings are automatically stored, and on a game-by-game basis, so if you like to play Chaturnaga on an uncheckered board with old-world pieces, but not other games, it will save it that way automatically. Additionally, right-click on any piece in any game, select properties, and it will give all kinds of information. In addition to a movement chart, it gives statistics for average mobility, average squares attacked, average directions attacked, and average number of safe checks on a board of the given size.</p>
<p>Finally, many bugs have been fixed, most importantly the problem with it freezing during computer thinking.</p>
Switching Chess. In addition to normal moves, switch with an adjacent friendly piece. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Jul 22, 2004 03:53 PM UTC:<p>When I implemented this game in ChessV, I delibrately disallowed switching of like pieces, since if I allowed them the computer would waste time considering lots of silly moves.
<p>Now that I think about it, however, I was hasty. I did not consider that if you could swap with like pieces, it would allow you to 'pass'. This would be a significant change from Chess. A good change or not, I don't know...
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Jul 22, 2004 04:00 PM UTC:<p>Some known bugs do exist (and perhaps some unknown ones). I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but there is a problem with resetting after a game concludes. You might need to just close the window and start over after each game. I have a list of about ten issues I'm working on before the next release, and this is an important one. Version 0.5 will probably be out in about 5-7 days!
<p>And thanks for the bug report; please let me know if I'm not understanding the bug you describe, or if you notice anything else! (The fact that the move list doesn't scroll is also a known problem.)
Switching Chess. In addition to normal moves, switch with an adjacent friendly piece. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Jul 23, 2004 03:12 AM UTC:ChessV is already right; I have always disallowed like-piece swapping. I disallowed it originally, because it never even occured to me that one could do that to avoid moving, and I didn't want to inflate the number of legal moves.
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Jul 23, 2004 10:54 AM UTC:<p>The Invaders are just a test army with very bizarre pieces I created just for the purpose of testing different functionality of ChessV. The other pieces probably aren't appearing because they have custom bitmaps I forgot to include in the distribution.
<p>I may make an actual army out of them in the future, though. I have had a couple of ideas recently...
Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Jul 23, 2004 10:24 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★<p>I love this Game Courier. It really is fantastic!</p>
<p>A <i>very tiny</i> bug report though, and I don't know if this is actually a problem with the GC or not, but when viewing the list of games in progress, and you click on 'Unicorn Great Chess' you get the description of <a href='/historic.dir/indiangr1.html'>Turkish Great Chess</a> and not <a href='/large.dir/unicorn.html'>Unicorn Chess</a>. In fact, I'm not sure the 'Great' belongs at all.</p>
<p>Thanks again! I'm so glad that I can play these games online! Now I just need to get around to reading the Developer's Manual ...</p>
Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jul 25, 2004 01:12 AM UTC:<h3>Entry 2: Chaining Chess</h3>
<p>Players start with the normal Chess setup, except that there are no Pawns. The remaining pieces move just like they do in Chess, except that they cannot capture. Since there is no capture, there is, of course, no Check or Checkmate. I don't know if it's even possible to get into a Stalemate situation or not, but if you are stupid enough to do it, you lose.</p>
<p>A player wins by forming a chain from rank 1 to rank 8. One of the player's pieces must occupy rank 1, and another must occupy rank 8. The player wins, if he also has other pieces 'chaining' these two together. Two pieces are chained if either can 'cover' the other by the rules of normal Chess capture, and are within a range of 3.</p>
Greg Strong wrote on Sun, Jul 25, 2004 05:48 PM UTC:Hmmm... very interesting idea, but I don't think that this can happen. Do you mean just not orthogonally adjacent? Otherwise I don't think there's enough squares to achieve a win ...
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝Greg Strong wrote on Wed, Jul 28, 2004 03:39 AM UTC:<p><b>ChessV 0.5 released</b>. This is mostly a maintenance release, but it does fix several important bugs. A couple of nasty bugs were allowing illegal moves to be made under strange situations. The move list now scrolls. Restarting games should also work correctly now in all cases (I hope.)</p>
<p>The only new variants added in this release are Archchess (historical) and Polymorph Chess, which is a new game I just invented. I will be uploading a page shortly, but basically it's normal Chess, but you can transform a Bishop into a Knight or a Knight into a Bishop instead of making a move. I also added Switching Chess variant João Pedro Neto suggested, disallowing switching of royal pieces.</p>
<p>Enjoy!</p>
Archchess. Large chess variant from 17th century Italy. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Wed, Jul 28, 2004 04:31 PM UTC:ChessV now supports this game. Since some rules are not known exactly, I had to make some guesses based on information on this page. So here you have it:
Castling: Castling is allowed if neither piece has moved previously. The King always slides 3 squares when castling to either side. The King may not castle into or through Check, but there is no prohibition against castling out of Check.
King's Leap: The King may also make a single 2-space leap horizontally or vertically on its first move. You may not leap into Check, but may leap out of it. Attacks on the square jumped over are irrelevant.
Misc: The special 2-space pawn move restriction mentioned here is implemented. Stalemate and 3-time repetition are considered draws. The 50-move pawn rule is also in effect.
Unicorn Chess. 
10x10 variant with a new piece that moves as a Bishop or a Nightrider. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Jul 29, 2004 02:53 PM UTC:I like this game a lot (or more particularly, the Unicorn Great Chess which doesn't have a page yet.) I have been thinking about how the pieces should be valued, and here is my suggestion:
Knight - 2.5
Bishop - 3.5
Lion - 4
Rook - 5
Chancellor - 8
Queen - 9
Unicorn - 9.5
Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Jul 30, 2004 07:38 PM UTC:These values may well be closer than mine, but I'm having a hard time believing that the Queen is worth more than the Unicorn. At the beginning of the game, the board is 44% full, and at that point the Unicorn has an average mobility of 14.18, compaired to only 12.36 for the Queen. Now, as pieces get traded off and the board clears out, the mobility of the Queen goes up a little faster. The average mobility of the two just happens to break even when exactly half the pieces are gone (board 22% full). And with even fewer pieces, the Queen begins to develop a small mobility advantage.
But, of course, there's more than mobility. I think other factors favor the Unicorn as well. The Queen attacks in 8 directions, whereas the Unicorn attacks in 12, giving it more forking power. Also, of the Queen's 8 directions, only 3 of them are forward. The Unicorn has twice as many forward attack directions (although 2 of them have a rather shallow slope.) Finally, there's stealth. The Unicorn's attacks along Knightrider lines is stealthy, meaning pieces attacked this way cannot counter-attack, with the exception of the Knight.
Presumably, the Queen has advantages, too. The forward Rook-slide is a very nice move because of it's ability to coordinate with the move of the pawns, and the Unicorn lacks this move. Any other Queen advantages I'm overlooking?
If anyone is interested in running a test, I think we can with the Game Courier. You take 2 Queens, I'll take 2 Unicorns ...
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]📝Greg Strong wrote on Tue, Aug 3, 2004 10:43 PM UTC:<p>Thank you for the query! Actually, Grand Chess is quite easy to implement, and I've got it about 75% done! I hope it will be in version 0.6, but I am waiting for permission. I have e-mailed Christian Freeling, but have not received a response yet (I only mailed him earlier today ...)</p>
<p>I also hope to have support for Omega Chess in the next version; I've already written the code for the extra 'hanging squares' on the corners. I contacted them for permission yesterday, and haven't heard from them yet, either.</p>
<p>On the other hand, Gothic Chess will probably NOT be supported, ever, unless the patent is found to be invalid (which by all rights it should.) Please don't ask why I don't license it; it's too long a story ...</p>
<p>Also, everyone may feel free to request variants! Most variants I can slap in pretty darn quickly. Only a couple of things that are problematic: (1) No support for hexagonal or circular boards YET, but that is comming by version 1.0 at the latest; (2) No support for 3-D or multiple boards, and not planned for version 1; (3) No support for wierd turn-orders like doublemove chess and unlikely in version 1; (4) games with drops (like shogi) could be supported fairly easily, but the level of play would be much lower than the other games; maybe not even any better than Zillions (at least not without a lot of work.)</p>
📝Greg Strong wrote on Wed, Aug 4, 2004 12:05 AM UTC:<P>Ahhh ... Ultima! I was afraid someone was going to ask for that! :)</P>
<p>Actually, there's no technical reason that Ultima can't be implemented, but it would take somewhat more time than a normal variant, because I have to teach it about: withdraw capture, pinching capture, coordination, etc. Still not tooo bad. There is another problem, though ...</p>
<p>Unlike Zillions, when I add a game, I need to not only teach it the rules, but I also specify quite a bit of information about how pieces and board positions should be evaluated. This is the primary reason why ChessV plays more intelligently. Unfortunately, I'm but an average Chess player, and probably below average at variants. Thus, to make ChessV play <i>really</i> well, I will need strategical help from more experienced members of the community. In the case of Ultima, I don't even have a guess at the most basic things, like what the pieces should be worth. If anyone has any ideas on this, please post them on the <a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/ultima.html'>Ultima page</a>.</p>
<p>P.S. Thank you for the blanket permission; that makes life much easier!</p>
Ultima. Game where each type of piece has a different capturing ability. Also called Baroque. (8x8, Cells: 64) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Aug 5, 2004 12:14 AM UTC:<p>Thank you. This information is most helpful!</p>
<p>The previous anonymous poster does make a point about sliding piece values, and ChessV already supports this. In Orthodox Chess, for example, I evaluate the Rook starting with the Speilmann value of 4500 (relative to a 1000-point pawn.) The value then is scaled up by 50 points for each capture of any piece, starting with the 10th. So, when the board is down to only 12 pieces, for example, the rook is then evaluated at 5000. I don't know how much this applies to Ultima, but since the previous poster brought it up, I thought I would mention it.</p>
Twenty-First Century Chess. An updating of Chess for the video game generation, on a 10x8 board with Barons and Jesters. (10x8, Cells: 80) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Aug 5, 2004 10:07 PM UTC:Good ★★★★This is, indeed, a very interesting game! I did just notice, however, another game with this name on George Jelliss' A Guide to Variant Chess site. The site indicates that this game was published in Variant Chess in 1991. I don't know if this is a problem or not, but I thought I would point it out.
Please understand, though, that I do not mean to diminish the creativity of this game in any way. The Jester is a particularly good innovation, and helps to diminish the value of opening books in a big way!
Chess Rules for Kids. An illustrated guide to the rules of chess for children.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Aug 6, 2004 06:49 PM UTC:<p>The King can capture any piece. Only one thing to be careful of:
the King cannot capture any piece that is protected by another piece. If
you were to do this, you would be moving <i>into</i> Check.
You must move out of Check, and never into it.</p>
Chess with Ultima, Rococo and Supremo Pieces. A series of variants with the Orthochess array transplanted to a 10x10 board and various exotic pieces added. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Greg Strong wrote on Sat, Aug 7, 2004 05:36 PM UTC:<p>In response to requests for <a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/ultima.html'>Ultima</a> support in <a href='http://gregstrong.com/ChessV/'>ChessV</a>, it seems reasonable to implement this game first, so I can write (and test) each of the wacky pieces seperately. Unfortunately, however, this game leaves the details of pawn moves and castling unclear.</p>
<p>My first thought is to give pawns a 3-step initial move, subject to en passant (as in <a href='http://www.omegachess.com'>Omega Chess</a>), allow castling, with the King sliding 3 spaces toward the Rook, and have pawns promote on the 10th rank, and allow promotion to the Ultima piece being used. Although, I also like the previous poster's suggestion of a <a href='http://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/ultima.html'>Grand Chess</a>-like setup. But then again, I'm somewhat partial to Grand Chess, because castling is eliminated, and there's no 3-step pawn move necessary, which would make en passant (the other awkward move) even more pronounced. I have no idea if pawn promotion on the 8th rank is good (in this game or any other.)</p>
<p>Of course, I can always support a couple of options, and I don't mind doing this, but I don't want to go crazy either. One thing I want to avoid is every game having so many check-boxes for options, that there are so many permutations that no two people on Earth are playing the same game. Besides, it requires more coding :)</p>
<p>Any comments on this?</p>
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