Comments by SamTrenholme

- Sam

- Sam

- Sam

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- Sam

As an aside, another of Greenwood's variant with this piece is Tamer Spiel (a 2002 variant) where it is called the 'Lion'.

- Sam

Maybe we can create a club where we study the opening lines of some random pure-chance recognized variant each week.

- Sam

• Are the pawns immediately promoted?
• Are the pawns left on the eight rank and are immobile?
• Are the pawns left on the eight rank, and can be promoted as a future white move?
• Or does on place a piece besides a pawn in his guard on the eight rank?

• White makes a move.
• Black then decides whether he wants to play with the white or black pieces.
• The came then continues as normal (with the possibility of the players swapping seats).

Any other opinions on using the pie rule in FIDE Chess?

Edit: I note that the Pie Rule does nothing to discourage Black from playing to draw. My answer to the draw problem is to make it so both players get 0 points (instead of half a point) in a drawn game; both players lose. Or have it so that the player with more material on the board wins .75 points after a three-fold repetition/50 moves without capture/insufficient mating material position. We can also consider the Ko rule for chess: You can not repeat a position on the board that has been already played.

Looks good.  I can't comment on it further until I see a Zillions
implementation and can playtest it a little, of course. 

Maybe I'll make a Zillions preset one of these days...

As I commented before, I like the idea of a variant that has many different possible permutations.

If you're interested, I can help by having a command-line version that can compile uisng the standard Gnu/UNIX toolchain--it would be nice to compile this program on something besides Windows + MSVC. I think that would encourage more developers (I'm a Linux developer who makes Windows ports with MingW32).

Again, thanks for the great work Greg. Good to see you back--I missed you!

- Sam

- Sam

I'll post some basic opening theory for Schoolbook later on this week. As a start, I like the way white's position looks after 1. f4 Nd6 2. g4

- Sam

Dragon feels like one of those complicated war games that Avalon Hill used to make, before they went out of business (OK, bought out by Hasbro) in the late 1990s. Now, when Avalon Hill was bought out, many, many people on Usenet were upset. Avalon Hill war games did not have enough general appeal to sustain the company, but their games did have a small group of very dedicated devotees.

In terms of why people go to this site, in my case I feel that FIDE chess has been over-analysed, with many opening variations over 20 moves deep. Also, the most common defense against 1. e4 for black is the Sicilian, which Morphy (my favorite player) referred to as resulting in 'uninteresting games and dreary analytical labours'. Even Kasparov recently stated that 'the volume of opening theory has reached threatening proportions and calls for need to find a way to alleviate the pressure of the endless opening databases'.

I feel these issues can be addressed by fairly minor modifications to the rules of chess. Many chess players agree; when Bobby Fischer said that 'Chess is dead', he was promoting his own Fischer Random chess. Indeed, Kasparov has given Fischer Random (where the pieces are shuffled) a reluctant endorsment, pointing out that most random shufflings of the Chess pieces 'are poison to your eyes'.

My own endorsment is the same one Capablanca had: A 10x8 board with a rook + knight and bishop + knight pieces added. Making the board just a little bigger greatly increases the number of possible opening setups. 8x8 chess can only have 1,440 unique setups of the pieces; a 10x8 board has 126,000 possible opening setups.

But I'm diverging.

Back to 'Dragon' (not be be confused with Gygax' 'Dragon Chess'), I think this game would be a lot more playable if a computer program could help enforce the rules. I encourage Glenn Nicholls to make either a computer program that can play this game, or a Zillions preset, so that people can more easily see if this game suits their tastes or not.

And, yes, 'Dragon Random' would have a huge number of possible opening setups.

• Capablanca Chess
• Fischer Random Chess
• 'Advanced Chess' (a.k.a computer assisted Chess)

I think the problem is that Andy wasn't fully able to see that he hurt Glenn's feelings when he was critical of his chess variant. It is very hard to be critical of a chess variant; see this discussion where I was critical of a variant.

In terms of Dragon, as I said before, I won't play it until a computer implementation is made, and Glenn is currently unwilling to make one. But, yes, I think this kind of Chess + wargame hybrid is a good idea. The rules are a bit complicated for my taste to try and learn this game unassisted, however. Then again, I never played anything more complicated than Axis and Allies without a computer.

I'm adding an excellent rating mainly to counterbalance Andy's poor rating.

- Sam

My program counts 9819. Here are my restrictions:

* All pawns defended

* King between rooks

* No bishops together

* No RNBQMKABNR setup (patented; M = Rook + Knight; A = Bishop + Knight)

I'm curious where the number 12,118 comes from.

- Sam