Comments by gwalla

'Pokemon' is an invariant plural (as has been pointed out before), unless you are a LOLcat. Also, Japanese is a language and an ethnicity, but not a location. And finally, calling a piece a 'bushido' is like calling a piece a 'chivalry' or an 'existentialism'.

Rating this poor because, aside from language issues, it is unplayable as written. Literally. It simply does not give enough information for somebody to be able to play a game of it.

Good goofy fun. Also, props for namedropping Girl Genius! ;)

One question, though: the instructions specifically say that you can attach a move part to an enemy piece, but why would you do that? I can't think of any situation where that would it would be advantageous to do that: it deprives you of a part you could add to one of your pieces, and gives your opponent more options. There's no real impetus to dispose of parts you can't use in this way (even spoilage is preferable, I would think). Was this rule included only to fit the theme, or does it have a real impact on gameplay?

A variation might be to have grafts remain under the control of the player who added them, regardless of who originally owned the piece. So if black grafted a fers to a white knight, he could move that piece as a fers (but not as a knight), potentially capturing a white piece. What's more mad-sciencey than mind control? Shades of The Other...

Of course, this ruleset could easily be applied to any of the various capablancoid large-army variants. And what about alfil & dabbabah components, or some way of breaking down bent riders? The potential for new crimes against nature seems limitless!

The link for Nine Queens Chess is broken (there's an extra .html at the end)

The link to Pink Panther Chess is also broken, but I'm not sure what the problem is there.

To belatedly answer Charles Gilman's question about yo vs. yon: those lists of numbers in Japanese tend to gloss over a lot of things. Japanese actually has two full sets of numerals, one native and one originally borrowed from Chinese, but uses the same kanji for both (Japanese actually does this for a lot of things besides numbers: most kanji have both on-yomi, or Chinese readings, and kun-yomi, or Japanese readings, and may have more than one of each). The set used most commonly is the Sino-Japanese set: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyuu, juu. In the modern language the native terms are more obscure (but do show up in certain restricted contexts, such as the 'tsu' counter and the first few counters for people) with the exception of 'yon' (4) and 'nana' (7), which are more or less interchangeable with the Sino-Japanese numerals when used stand-alone. In most kun-yomi compounds, though, the kanji meaning 4 appears as 'yo', sometimes doubling the following consonant (as in 'yottsu', 'four things'). I don't know the history of the language that well, but if I were to guess I'd say that 'yo' is the original form (or derived directly from the original form), and the '-n' was added just to the form that is used stand-alone and in compounds with on-yomi.

'Yon' is about as common as 'shi' (unlike most other numbers) because 'shi' is also an on-yomi for the kanji meaning 'die', and is therefore considered unlucky. This homophony was inherited when the kanji and their on-yomi were borrowed from Chinese, which has the same superstition about the number 4. Not sure why 'nana' is also an exception.

There is no kanji with the reading 'n'. All of them can function as a complete syllable. (Syllable-final 'n' in Japanese is sometimes referred to as 'syllabic N' but it really isn't, it just gets its own kana unlike the syllable-initial N, and makes the syllable long)

The rules of Ajax Orthodox Chess specifically state that the Minister may
capture with its one-step move. The different colors are probably to show
that it leaps to the 2nd perimeter rather than blockably sliding.

Idle thoughts: taking the name 'trampoline' literally, allow a slider continuing across a trampoline without changing direction to move as a hopper. I wonder if it'd make the trampoline too powerful though.

Also, hybrid Trampoline/Pole Chess? (TramPoleIne?) One piece expands move options, the other restricts...

Just a suggestion, George: could you put the name of the latest addition in
the list in boldface so it's easier to see where youve ranked it? The list
is getting pretty long and increasingly difficult to locate things in.