Comments by JianyingJi

Excelent and under-appreciated gem! In a few game of this variant, 
I found how the simplest change alters the game dramatically. For
example this variant makes bishop no longer color bound, and 
nullifies the use of castling.

I have thought about it for quite a while, that chess lacks a coherent
handicap system. (A good example of a coherent handicap system is that 
of go) How do we go about crating one for chess? Certainly chess for
different armies of ralph betza points the way forward. Black Ghost of
Ralph Betza is a step toward a handicap system. Using these as stepping
stones, let me propose the following:

Types of Handicap:

Range: Gradual limiting of the range of stronger player's pieces 

Functional: Limiting the leaping/capturing ability of the stronger player

Balancing: Adding power to the weak side, for example adding of a ghost
 like in ghost chess.

Of course how a comprehensive system might look like, I'm not sure yet,
 so any comments welcome.

Absolutely cool! Very well explained! Simpler in feel and direct in play 
#than some of the other similar ideaed games

Continuing with this subject let me propose the following:

let their be 9 levels of mastery (similar to asian game ratings, but 
                                  in keeping with western chess theme,
                                  we need a different name than dan)

Between each level and the one below is divided 4 sublevels. 
(Again a name is sought)

The difference between sublevels is one point, as described by Ralph Betza

in  http://chessvariants.com/d.betza/pieceval/p3-01.html.  The move is 
good enough for difference of one sublevel.

The difference between levels is then naturally 4 points, or pawn and
move.

For other handicaps we need to temper with the army somewhat, but 
whatever we do must be ballanced, from openning to endgame.

Also as can be calculate, I envision the largest handicap to be 36 
points, roughly the value of an amazon. I think this is a reasonable
 upperbound but as I am not a good chess player, input would be really 
appreciated.

This game is highly remaniscent of Capriccio described by Mark Thompson
at
http://home.flash.net/~markthom/html/capriccio.html. though maybe arguably

better since the goal is better defined.

I am creating a pawnless CV, which suddenly led to the question of:

What happens in FIDE chess if we remove the pawns and disallow castling.
Does white have overwhelming advantage or is there a good defense for 
black?

Continuing what Ralph said about the need for more prominent heading for
chess history. One possible idea is a specific page on the history of 
chess that shows a genealogy of chess. A genealogy because it shows both
history and the relationship between the different historical variants.
Such an undertaking would be no small one by any means but would provide
a good context for the layman and scholar alike in the foundations of 
this pusuit of variants.

Since the major pieces in the back row are weak, it might make sense for
the following variant:

No apprentices, Just the backrow pieces. and have the pieces promote to
full strength when they reach the backrow. With the same object of
checkmating the king.

The diagrams will have to be described using FFEN, which the FFEN to HTML
converter will take care of the rest. And probably lots of proofreading.
But it is possible.

Every move imitates the ability of the piece moved before, except the
first move for nothing is before it. What if time is circular, in that
spirit I propose the following variant:

As a first move, any piece can be moved with any power, however this
implies the last move must be made with a piece with such power, and
any move during the game that would make such a ending impossible is 
declared illeagal.

I have been studying the advices in this thread and examining some of 
my ideas along this line. The following is what I have developed so far:

Pawnless Chess

-by Jianying Ji			

Introduction:

This variant is inspired  these primary sources: 
1: Kevin Maroney's Ur Chess
2: Ralph Betza's Halfling Chess

One of the main motivations of this variant is similar to that of Ur Chess
in that I was looking for a 'simplified' variant of chess. As I read Ur
chess I saw that many of the fiddly rules he was trying to change concerned
pawns, so it seemed natural to me to dispense with pawns alltogether. But
that led to an immediate problem, which is with the major pieces of FIDE
facing each other the opening usually end up with a lot of exchanges and
not many pieces on the board after the exchanges end.  To combat this, the
pieces needs to be weakened and captured pieces recycled. So I used
halfling chess to weaken the pieces, and added the capture return rule to
recycle the pieces. I changed the knight to halfling Knightrider to
strengthen the army a bit so that it won't be too slow. The details
follows:

Board and Setup:

Use standard chess board and setup with the pawns removed

r n b q k b n r
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * *
R N B Q K B N R

Rules:

1. All pieces move as they do in halfling chess, except the knight, 
which becomes a halfling knightrider.

Motivation: To weaken the pieces so the opening will be more strategic,
rather than tactical. As Peter Aaronson suggested and Ralph Betza showed.

2. A captured piece is returned to the owner, who is to put it back on 
its starting rank. It is the owner's choice, which open square to put 
the returned piece on.  If the starting rank is fully occupied then 
the captured piece is discarded.

Motivation: Since the ratio of pieces to squares is so low, to start 
with, this rule will keep more pieces in play longer, for a more 
tactical and longer endgame.

3. No repetition of a previous board position

Motivation: Super-Ko rule is adopted to reduce draws.

Object:

Checkmate or stalemate the opponent

Motivation: Stalemating the opponent is included as a winning condition 
to reduce draws.

Notation:

R        a1        x           a5  	         [a8]
piece	source   capture    destination    drop location

piece: name of the piece
source: starting square
capture: x if capture occured, - if non-capturing move.
destination: ending square
drop location: the location to which the captured piece is dropped

Can be abbreviated if no ambiguity arises.

Remember, if capture occurs, drop location must be specified.


Comments:

Shortest fool's mate is 2.5 moves, which is comparable to FIDE, 
with the added benefit of being more 'foolish'.

Tempo is most important in this game. Losing tempo can be fatal. 
It is even more important than safety of specific pieces. Since 
pieces are recycled.

I have done some playtesting but I would welcome more. And any
more suggestions!

A possible pair of leapers:

Long leaper: same as in this variant except when capturing must jump over
             at least two empty squares before the captured piece.

Short leaper: moves as an Orthodox Queen and captures by overtaking. 
              the piece captured must be within two squares of the
              short leaper. It may land any vacant square somewhere 
              beyond it. It may jumpover friendly pieces, but not 
              capture them. It captures any enemy piece(s) lept over.
              The adjacent square that it lept over must be occupied.
              It may not make more than one short leap in a turn. It 
              may end its move on an edge square only when that is the 
              only way to make a particular capture.

Nice concept and very cleanly explained, however the example might be
flawed, since e1-d2 should be illeagal for it moves white king into
check, because the black king has the backing of a queen so it can
move as a queen and take take the white king in the next move. a
black bishop instead of queen would work.

Sometimes a random search can come up with amazing things, I was
searching for some material for an variant of mine when I came across
this item. It is very well illustrated and strait forward and provides
a good blueprint for how intergrid peice should work. very nice work
indeed.

I would suggest that at the beginning of the game only allow the black
player to spinnach, this would balance the first move advantage.

Absolutely a must read for formalizing variants. Will definitely be one
of my references for my variants in the future, and will safe a lot of
typing too :-) now that I can just refer to Rule zero

This variant can be easily handicapped by giving the weaker player 
an extra amount of zorkmids at the start. the amount depending on
the deference between the players.

this is absolutely amazing. a very clear exposition and easy to follow.

The thing that intrigues me the most is a move leading to stalemate is
not allowed. which get's away from the fuddily rules in FIDE and other
variants dealing with stalemates. I think this is a worthwhile rule to 
adopt in other variants.

I think part of the trouble with this variant, and the reason that people
hesitate to try it is the lack of a coherent theme, by theme I include 
abstract themes such as all pieces have abstract quality X. 

this game have various categories of pieces:

King : royal

Squire, Viceroy, Pawn, Crowned Knight, left/right schzzhi: normal, 
      i.e. no special powers but can be effected by others

Bobber: extending powers (to itself)

dazzler, hyenna : immobilizer

archer, zednick : confabulators

yanzee : invulnerable

extentialist : morph

teleporter: transports self.

I feel there's a excess of categories and overlap between the powers 
between the pieces. this game would be better I think if no two pieces
have the same higher power. for example having had the dazzler both 
hyenna and yanzee is somewhat superflous.

similarly archer is a more coherent piece than zednick which has 4 
unrelated powers, so it would be a better games without zednick.
A compromise would to give the power of the zednick to the bobber
which creates the stretegic tension of whether to keep the bobber 
around or to confabulate it with some other piece to increase that
piece's power.

I think the more constrained variant below might be easier to start 
with:

all the normal pieces and the king.

King : royal

Squire, Viceroy, Pawn, Crowned Knight, left/right schzzhi: normal

Dazzler: as the immobilizer and giver of invulnerability

archer: as the confabulator

bobber/zednick: moves as bobber or can confabulate as a zednick

teleporter: transports itself

extentialist: cycles through all the non-royal pieces, on 11th move it 
              sleeps, than another cycle, then explode.

I think I have preserved all the ideas in your game and simplified it
a bit. hope you find it interesting.

this is a very nice page that provide info on a whole class of pieces.
I like its organization very much

how cool, I was just wondering about leapers for a variant I was 
designing. this is perfect for it. and the diagram of the where all
the leaper go is great, a very good exposition

It seems to me that the elephant in xiangqi (on the blackside) is
most likely and almost certainly an import from india since china
has no elephants. the character used on the black side is that of 
elephant which would be quite strange if it originated in china. so
certainly that perticular character and that piece must have come after
contact with india. 

The cannon piece almost certainly originated in china, since
china invented gun powder quite early on.

Also the different symbols on each side almost hint that it might be 
different army game once, with different powers on the sides, though
there might have been a more prosaic reason, that all the pieces have
different symbols between the sides since the original pieces were carved
and the only way to tell the sides were the characters. (red and black
came later)

And finally, since it is the elephant (xiang) that gives name to the 
whole game, that is if translated directly word for word xiangqi would
be elephant boardgame (qi having being derived from weiqi) and that 
elephants only known in china after contact with india, it is very likely
that modern xiangqi derives from indian source.

A great and detailed page. However the images are not visible due to some 
mal formed link addresses ie the wrong slash being used. nonetheless the
contents are very useful

It might be interesting to try the following modest variant of ximeracak:

0: all rules as Ximeracak except as noted below
1: when the general is under check it can switch with
   the pegasus, provided of course the pegusus is not
   also attacked.

This simple modification will increase the pegasus's streategic value
which will make people be more careful before putting pegasus in harm's
way, and keep it in the game for the end game. In fact it should have
the overall effect of decreasing the apeal of captures in the game.

Since ALL FIDE laws apply, I would say the answer for the question is 
most likely the following:

1: Fifty move rule, the stalemated player gets to roll the dice and if 
the opponent's roll or one's own removes stalemate before the opponent
manages a checkmate then the game continues otherwise if it is still a 
stalemate after fifty moves then draw (probably extremely unlikely)

2: This is a tricky one, most variants would probably say that definitely
double step allowed for a2 but a1 I'm not sure, though I think it 
probably should be allowed

3: I think that should be a yes

Hope we'll have adrain's take soon

I wonder what about fWD? 
And what adjective should be used with this kind of elephant?

This been an idea I been thinking of for a while. It pleases me to no end
that someone has made a variant along these lines. It would be great to
see more variants using 'influencing' as an element in them.

Since white has slight opening advantage, it would be more equitable
if the game start with black refusing one move from white and then 
white move and refuse black then game continues as described ...

The page was not index so I'm writing the comment here:

Here's a modest variant:

immortal pawns:

Pawns promotes on the owner's last three ranks. 
Promotion required on last rank only.
Pawns promote to captured pieces only.
Pawns are return to the owner to be dropped, if captured.
Dropped pawn drops only to the first four ranks of the Pawn's owner.
Drops takes a whole turn.

Comments:

These changes are motivated by the desire to make it possible 
to resurrect any piece and have after some captures to restore 
back on the board the full 32 piece complement, and to do so with
minimal change to the rules. It seemed tweeking promotion as the 
simplest way to do that

Really well designed and explained large variant without the clutter that
often afflict them

excellent game,

one of the illustration has the wrong coloring for the squares. The 
second set in the middle of the page, board2 should have the opposing
coloring

It is quite amazing to me that the rook remained so consistant over the
years. It is the only piece that is in all the historic variants, from 
shatranji to shogi. So if one really want to trace the history of chess,
the rook probably is a important part of that.

quick note: web page for  Andrew Bartmess and tridim chess has changed 
to  http://www.grigor.org/tactical.htm

I think the question is essentially, if a player has a choice of 
perpetual check, or a different move. Can s/he chose the perpetual check
instead of the other move. which is covered:

http://chessvariants.com/d.chess/eternal.html

So I think the answer is yes and charles's friend is probably right.

I was thinking along these lines sometimes ago, but my ideas never geled
into a playable game. So it very nice to see some incarnation of it. 
Absolutely cool!

interesting variant, I wonder if giving king a knight's move would make
the king too hard to capture. With all those combo pieces, it seems only
fair to give the king a bit more movements too.

Quite interesting variant. With simpler army building then standard
CWDA, since only three piece types define a army rather than four.

An interesting variant might be to add the following rules:
3: No FIDE captures allowed
4: Win by pictorial mate.
5: Super-Ko no position maybe repeated

Another way to balance 1 and 1/2 move chess is to have white accumulate
at 1.45 moves instead of 1.5 this way after a 20 move game white will be
off by exactly 1 move that it is penalized at the start for.

I wonder what is effect of symmetry of starting setup on strategy.
Comparing Shantranj and Chuturanga, it occured to me that one has
radial symmetry, while the other billateral symmetry. Which one has
better balance?

This list is quite comprehensive, and quite impressive. Which makes it 
doubly strange that the odds chess has not persisted in any serious way 
in chess clubs today, especially organizations such as FIDE to determine
the rating, handicap correspondence.

Chess had not had a tradition for handicaps, especially in the last 
100 years. (Before that in the 18th 19th century there was odds chess
which I thought looks like a good and fairly comprehensive system, but
strangely it does not seem to have been adopted by organizations like 
FIDE) So, recently I being thinking about handicap systems and thought
of a cross between shogi and chess that would provide a path toward 
handicaps. What I propose is then the weaker player given a set of tokens
that give him the ability to drop captured pieces as his own for the
price of the value of the piece he is too drop. In a even game the second
player receive a small set of tokens to balance first mover advantage.
If both player play with infinite tokens, the game becomes chessgi. If 
one side plays with infinite and the other player 0 then the infinite 
would probably have a guarenteed win. If both side have a limited supply
of token then the game would have a finer balanced hadicaps.

These are just some ideas, any comment welcome.

Since pieces never disapear from the game, in shogi the values are all 
positional. That is pieces in hand can be considered as just another 
position for the pieces to be. and that value is assessed for a position
taking into account of the positions of all pieces including those in 
hand and whose turn it is. So in a sense it is more like go, only 
holistic evaluation can be done.

Thanks for the response. I have thought further, and thinks that the
dropping handicaps that I proposed suffers from similar flaws. Perhaps
the most chesslike handicap is to give the weaker side the chance to
augment the army temporarily. Say a set of tokens which for the price 
of one gives the pieces to take a step to an adjacent non-occupied 
square. One such token will probably be enough to even the odds between
the players when given to the second player. It would convert some draws
to wins and losses to draws. Though I could be wrong, for I am not too
good at judging these things.

Draw margin is dependent on the skill level of the play. In high level
FIDE chess, as the recent competitions have shown the draw margin can
be as high as 66% of all the games. It is so bad that some competition
actively try to discourage draws. So draws can be a problem. And I think
any chess variant that allows exchange to draw that is sacrificing
material to force opponent into draw, is liable to have larger and larger
draw margins as skill level increase. But ultimately it is an aethetic 
decision on whether this is a bad thing.

Cool!

one thing I find a bit aethetically off is that linking is not compulsary
in that player could ignoire linking completely and play normal chess. So
to satisfy my twisted aesthetics I would recommend following changes as a
sub-variant:

0. Twinkie Danger Chess rule apply unless contradicted below.
1. White start on board 0 and black start on board 1
2. King remain on the board they started

In this sub-variant no progress can be made without linking, so linking
becomes crucial way to mobilize your forces.

Thanks for everything hans. Best wishes on hans' other projects in life
and hope to see hans dropping by in comment section once in a while.

has anyone  gotten word from ralph? it seems it has been ages since any
post from him!
Any iinfo would be appreciated!

Why don't we make a wiki instead of a pure comment system (somewhat tongue
in cheek, since I know wikis are not trivial things)

The advantage of wikis are that flame wars tend to burn itself out, with
both sides actively deleting comments, until none is left. And the only
things that are left are non-flame based comments.

I agree largely with fergus and george that discussions limited to the
variants themselves are much better than flame wars over ultimately
unimportant points.

new web site for circular chess society:
http://circularchess.runtingz.co.uk/Homepagex.htm

Very interesting game, and fairly modest too, which I like. I have  a few
quick observations:

I.  a-file and 8th rank is safe from the angels neither angel can jump
over them due to the edge on the left side.

II. By switching the demon and angel on the h-file with the knight on the
i-file their coverage is expanded so only the 8th rank becomes safe from
angel-fire, and the demons cover the whole board. Aethetically, you gain a
more symmetric setup. Moreover, with the white side holding the marginally
weaker angels, the first player advantage is probably canceled.

III. to make both side even more equal, you might consider making it 7 or
9 ranks (9 being my preference, a hint of dante) instead of 8, this way
there will be no safe zone from angel-fire

IV. to make a greater hommage to your inspiration you might make the game
byzantine by joining the left and right sides of the board.

hopefully you find my comment interesting and perhaps useful...

A great game with a very fresh idea!

I have a small point:

Having the second player mirror the first player's piece layout while
allowing both to layout thie terrain (the black squares) separately give
the first player a unequal advantage. Since the first player can always
layout the pieces to make it difficult for the opponent. The opponent
would be forced to start off at a disadvantage. 

The simple solution is to allow the players to lay out pieces, the way
terrain is laid out, separately. No need to enforce symmetry.

Jeff, I'm interested, it would nice if you can post it. maybe even as a
page in it self. I look forward to its details.

The lack of innovation of this commercial game suprises, one would have
thought that they do their due diligence and seek out something more
innovative, as very much on displayed here. Most of the games on these
pages easily out flanks games such as this.

Here's the challenge: What is the most minimal change of the rules that
one can propose that would make this game much more innovative?
Suggestions?

While we are at it, here's another prob: When commenting on a game, you
are given the option of rating 'below average' or 'average' in
addition to the four that there used to be. When you edit the remark later
however, you are not given the 'below average' and 'average' ratings.