Comments by nelk114

The link in the introduction is broken; it should probably point to the author's translation of the Chaturanga page — note that the latter, as well as the Courier Chess page still need converting (the Shogi page oþoh seems intact — it was last edited in 2018 though so perhaps it escaped the corruption). Also is there an old backup of the Chinese page on FIDE? As it stands now it's complete nonsense. EDIT: The Wayback Machine has a copy (and the garbled version seems to have the same update stamp so it probably hadn't changed in the 14 years before conversion to its current state)

I don't see anything wrong with having pages in multiple languages here, and we do indeed have some pages in Spanish, among others. The Alphabetical Index issues queries for English pages only by default, but you can query for non‐English pages too — apparently there's only(!) 108 of them so there's no difficulty getting them to display. Though in any case the Index lacks pages for “Pages beginning with ⟨菲⟩”, for example…

That does indeed look quite plausible (as does the Shatranj page), and concords with my own efforts at making sense of it, as well as lining up, afaict, with what the English page says.

The note at the end looks a little odd (It literally reads, as far as my Chinese gets me: “This is our English page's translation Fischer Random Chess”; the syntax of the Chinese is fine afaict but the link afterward, even with a space separating it, reads strangely). Would it be worth putting the link on the Chinese for “Our English page” (i.e. “我们英文页面”) instead?

Also incidentally what software did you use to convert it to CP1252? All the immediately accessible ones on linux seem to put up a (quiet) fuss about e.g. U+0081 not being available in the target encoding.

The classic answer was to hold a Design contest (the obvious themes in this case being Silver and/or the nr 25), but I'm not sure if we have enough people active here aþm for that to really work — istr the 2017 20th‌‐anniversary one never really went anywhere (though I suppose one could always try recruiting from other Variant fora…).

That said, a tournament would work too. Featuring games from throughout the pages' tenure…

Speaking of both names and M&B, worth noting that Paulowich's Spotted Gryphon is called an Angel there, and Gilman's Nightingale is close to your F-then-W-then-DD piece, though it cannot stop on the F square (and thus makes exactly an even number of steps). The Chainsaw (and a whole class of related pieces) remains unnamed.

It's added to the number of remaining moves before a draw, afaict — i.e. your latter alternative. Though I can see how my wording was ambiguous; sorry for any additional confusion from my part

This one?: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=33008

I happened to be reading this thread recently so it's still freshish in my memory

Three obvious potential improvements stand out, besides the aforementioned grammatical issues:

• The setup diagram is misleading; even though you clarify that the fore‐ and hindmost ranks are not actually part of the board, it's probably better to make that clear in the diagram too
• Similarly, using pieces to denote destination squares in the movement diagrams is extremely(!) confusing. The diagram designer does provide for using coloured circles for this purpose; consider finding out how to use that functionality
• The drop rule is not clear. You say that cannons and two soldiers start in hand and may be dropped only on resp^ly the 1^st or 3^rd rank, but even this information is easily missed and further details (is it Shōgi‐style drops? Seirawan‐style? Sth else entirely?) are completely unspecified. I'd suggest putting a note about it in the Rules section

Also a typo: your paragraph about the Soldier refers to droppable pawns.

You mean how could it be described? With the new E atom it should be simple enough to do exactly one reflection: [B-E-sB] (a slight change from the regular refl. B in HG's comment) For arbitrarily many, but at least one, I think we still need the off‑board interpretation of o as the [] notation lacks arbitrary repetitions afaict. That would give something like yafoabyas(yafoabyas)B (though the sandbox seems to ignore the brackets on the second one, only allowing either one or two reflections… probably I'm doing sth wrong)

I think you've asked a similar question before, and the answer (including re this case) is further down this comment thread ;)

I also have a question of my own: just to clarify, a Dark Spirit or Buddhist Spirit capturing a Deva or Teaching King, or vice versa, causes it, like other pieces, to convert to its victim? The notes clarify that, as expected, one of them would disappear, but don't make clear which one, and one could make a case imo for contageous pieces being immune to contageon themselves.

It's still not clear what this means. A withdrawer captures by making a move, whilst an immobiliser stops others from making moves — the former's effect is on its own turn while the latter's is on the opponent's.

As such there's a couple of interpretations possible:

• It stops things from moving away like a withdrawer. This is just a weaker immobiliser, and is already attested in Euqorab
• It petrifies pieces that it moves away from rather than capturing them. Then the question is whether and if so when pieces can come back into play: never (as with Nemoroth's basilisk)? When the withdrawing‐petrifier moves again (leaving it able to only petrify one piece at a time)? After a larger but still fixed number of moves (turn counting, ugh)? Under some other condition? Are involuntary moves (from Swappers, shepherding pieces, Go Away!s, ⁊c.) counted? Does capturing it release pieces?

Imo the former option is not very interesting, nor necessarily well‐defined (how does it deal with knights?), while the latter is quite complex in principle and perhaps not very immobiliser‐like — though I admit the possibility of ulima‐style pieces with effects besides capture is interesting and not very well explored

‘Idk’ and the others are indeed abbreviations: ‘Idk’ itself is ‘I don't know’; ‘Afaik’ ‘as far as I know’; ‘Ofc’ ‘Of course’; and ‘Iirc’ ‘if I recall correctly’.

As for trivially making up, a pawn on the central rank stops the opponent's pawn from making the same move (as that space is now occupied) and the opponent can't immediately do anything equivalent, and so has won a (potentially) better position with little effort — and since White can force this more easily than Black, the argument goes that normal pawns of an odd‐file board might give White more of an advantage. Here is the formal write‐up of Hutnik's idea, which he first proposed here, and the first few comments on Elven Chess(/Elven Shogi) also touch on it.

I seem to remember the old versions of some of your larger games (Gigachess ⁊c.) had the Ship, before you updated them. And ofc I wasn't accusing you of ‘stealing’ the ship ;) just noting that it also exists where the snaketongue was first named (I expect Eric probably got it from there, though it's certainly possible he came up with it independently).

I believe you want checkaride instead of checkride — the latter checks all directions symmetrically (making a full gryphon plus conditional wazir moves), while the former is asymmetric.

Presumably if your suggestion for the Ship is otherwise correct, the snaketongue would similarly be:

def G fn (checkaride #0 #1 1 1 and empty #0)
    where #0 0 1
    #1
    or fn (checkaride #0 #1 -1 1 and empty #0)
    where #0 0 1
    #1
    or fn (checkaride #0 #1 1 -1 and empty #0)
    where #0 0 -1
    #1
    or fn (checkaride #0 #1 -1 -1 and empty #0)
    where #0 0 -1
    #1
    or checkleap #0 #1 1 0;

def GL mergeall
    leaps #0 1 0
    ray where #0 0 1 1 1
    ray where #0 0 -1 1 -1
    ray where #0 0 1 -1 1
    ray where #0 0 -1 -1 -1;

Chu does have quite a few short‐range pieces, like (Sho) Shōgi; it's not exactly devoid of longer‐range ones though: Rook, Bishop, Queen, as well as Dragon Horse and ‐King are the more conventional ones (and all but the queen in pairs), and it even has, to Western eyes, weird things like side‐/vertical movers and their promotions. And even with the short‐range ones, at first sight the variety of very similar moves might seem confusing just as several long‐range pieces might.

Gross Chess is popular here among CV fans; that speaks, no doubt, to its playability and potential popularity — and may well indicate it as a good candidate for a successor — but says very little imo about how 12×12 might fare among a more lay audience — while Chu demonstrates that it's possible for it to hold that status.

The point about game length is potentially a concern once the board gets bigger (and is almost certainly, alongside tractability, once of the limiting factors for going to e.g. 14×14 and beyond as anything ore than a novelty), though I'd've expected at least games with plenty of long‐range pieces to balance that somewhat. I wonder how long the average game of Gross or Metamachy (of which I've been playing a fair bit against Jocly's AI recently) is, esp. compared to Chu.

Merry (belated) Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

the same trouble with the bishop and queen.

It's not entirely clear what the analogous ‘error’ would be. In the REX King's and Glinski Pawns' cases it's using orthogonal moves to the exclusion of hex‐diagonal ones, while this knight apparently just miscounted the diagonal portion, resulting in a piece (which Charles Gilman terms a Student) which is analogous to the square‐cell Zebra.

A queen analogous to the REX king just becomes a rook, but that leaves the bishop completely unaccounted for.

Ofc, there are a few variants which take this version of king and queen as their basis and build the rest of the pieces around them: the oldest is Sigmund Wellisch's 3‐player game (for which this site unfortunately has only a Java Applet, though a more complete description is available e.g. on John Savard's page); the king moves one orthogonally, the knight to any nearest square that the king can't reach (there is a certain logic to calling the hex diagonals ‘leaps’, given that the relevant cells don't actually touch), the rook slides orthogonally, the queen moves as rook or knight (technically a marshal analogue therefore), and the pawn in either of the forwardmost directions (the board being oriented as in Fergus' Hex Shogis).

Alternatively, Gilman's Alternate Orthogonals Hex Chesses do exactly what the name suggests: assign alternate orthogonals as analogous to the square‐board directions, giving a REX king and Glinski pawns together with Wellisch knights, a rook as a ‘queen’, and ‘rooks’ and ‘bishops’ which have each other's move but backwards — albeit this being Charles Gilman, the pieces all have ifferent names. This one had quite a positive reception, and it does preserve some aspects of square‐cell chess that other analogies lack (some of which are touched on in its comments) — it's certainly worth a look

@Max

Game Courier doesn't (currently?) support games for more than two players. Idk how those four‐player variants were done, though it wouldn't surprise me if it's in teams where each player is suppoesd to control both armies in each team. (presumably these are not rule‐enforcing)

I feel like multiplayer games may technically be on Fergus' list of things to Maybe Eventually Add to GC (istr him mentioning it though I wouldn't hold him to that) but there's no support now and iirc probably requires a fairlyfundamental refactor at the very least

that initial legs would behave differently from only legs.

The behaviour is the same if you stipulate that all slider legs are potentially 0‐length but null moves are disallowed unless explicitly specified

Perhaps we have different intuition

May well be :) And fwiw I'm fine with either system in practice

When 0 steps is allowed, you would need [F-fF-fB] for the Tamerlane Picket

Or simply [nA-fB], which to me looks more natural as an alfil extension (istr Gilman classes it that way too). [F-fB] is ofc a bit odd as a Bishop description, but there are always going to be strange ways of notating things

BTW, [W?sfNN], and even [W?sfCC] work now. All through using a new, undocumented (and quite horrible) extension of XBetza.

That's pretty cool :) (and agreed, the repeating ys are… not pretty). I can even get an offset giraffe‐rider (or even zemel‐rider — presumably longer ones work too, if they'd fit on the board), even though normal giraffe‐riders (FXFX?) are apparently unsupported!

But the y extension still fails for e.g. [W?sfZZ] (also shouldn't that be fsNN ⁊c?), let alone pathological things like [C?fsZZ], so if we're making an effort to support direction‐type changes it probably deserves to be more general.

Also speaking of the Z, [Z?sfB] currently gives me Zebra‐then‐Rook, and vice‐versa