Comments by panther

Hi H.G.

Is there a (preferably simple) way for your 'Interactive Diagrams' to generate diagrams for unusual board shapes such as hexagonal, circular or custom boards?

Thanks H.G. for your reply. "Custom board" diagrams are described this way in Game Courier documentation, so it seems your answer of 'no' is right on, as I had very oddly shaped boards as one possible thought, for one thing.

For now, I had been a bit curious about circular boards, and wished to test making a diagram for one from scratch, by simple means if possible. If I wish to, I think I can cut and paste the http address for an existing setup diagram, such as I've seen on a number of webpages on this website. I'd be confined to using the setup that it depicts, unless I combined it with other (preferably circular!?) setup[s], to create a 3D (or even 4D?!) variant of my own, for example.

Even using just one circular board setup diagram, however, I might invent my own rules for the piece movements to be used for any possible variant of mine, to be played on that circular board. Recall (naturally) that many variants have been created using just the setup for standard chess.

In regard to diagrams for "custom boards" again, I also was thinking of, say, even 8x8 boards with graphics on individual squares (or some of them). I think I've seen at least one such board used for a variant included on this website. A whimsical thought that came to me the other day would be to somehow combine Chess and Snakes & Ladders, though it would be a very involved and lengthy project to complete, I suspect.

I've now removed all remaining unwanted primitive (ASCII) diagrams from my 4*Chess submission, replacing them with Diagram Designer generated diagrams that still show possible legal moves on an empty 4D board by all the various piece types.

In my submission I gave links from my Chess Federation of Canada website blog, including my entry there that covered Sac Chess in detail. Included in that entry was my proposal for two slight spinoff variants of Sac Chess to accomodate anyone who dislikes Amazons being clearly more powerful than a Queen. One spinoff variant ("Cash Chess") had two different piece compound pieces replacing each of the 2 Amazons in both camps. These were to be B+N+K ("Freemason") and R+N+K ("Ship") compounds, each a compound piece of my own invention (afaik). 

I wasn't keen on this spinoff variant myself, since there would be less near-symmetry in each camp, and there would be more piece types to remember in total. The other spinoff variant ("Royal Sac Chess") would let Queens have a small distinction over Amazons on at least some occasions. In this spinoff variant, in the event of stalemate or a three-fold repetition of moves (perpetual check being a case of such), if one side had more queens on the board than his opponent then he would win the game, else it would be a draw in the event of an equal number of queens.

I kind of liked this spinoff variant, as perhaps an important way to justify having Queens on the board alongside Amazons (which are clearly superior in their relative value AND movement capabilities on an empty board). On the other hand, it's using a rather artificial rule change that would drastically affect some games' final results. 

In the end, I decided that the reasons you gave for liking having a Queen, besides Amazons, were adequate enough, such as keeping a quaint royal tradition going in spite of my wanting to include many compound pieces in Sac Chess, including Amazons. The Amazon seems to get a bad rap because it is so powerful (it can mate a King on an empty board with no assistance, for instance). At least having a Queen on the board as a possible threat to trade itself for an Amazon gives a player with an Amazon one more thing to watch out for.

Hi H.G.

Do you know if this Shogi variant was ever played that much? I am curious since I've invented a number of 4D chess variants with many pieces per side, the largest of them being a 5x5x5x5 variant (5*4DChess) with 140 pieces (i.e. 70 per side). That is less than this Shogi variant has, and it has fewer piece types (14) than it, though my 5x5x5x5 variant has more board cells (625) than this old Shogi variant. It could increase my faint hopes that my largest 4D variant might be played even a little (if at all) at some point if this Shogi variant was ever remotely popular.

H.G. wrote:
"...Note that size is not the exclusive determining factor. The large Shogi variants are all designed to have a few 'boss pieces' in them, which are capable of massacring weaker pieces at high rate. Even when the latter flock together in dense crowd where they mutually protect each other. Because pieces like Lions and their ilk have rifle-capture modes that thwart protection. And often there are rules that prevent them from being traded out of the game. Without such features the games would quickly degenerate into a tedious and boringly slow shuffling of all the weak pieces, with large probability for a stand-off. Tenjiku Shogi (2x78 pieces) did enjoy quite some popularity amongst western players a decade or so ago. But this is unique amongst the historic Shogi variants for having ultra-powerful Fire Demons (2 per side) which can capture up to 8 pieces in one turn, and greatly shorten the duration of the game (even compared to the much smaller Chu Shogi, where a typical game lasts 200-300 moves)."

Thanks for your reply H.G. I've played standard Shogi many times, and I've tried Chu Shogi once (though my opponent and I had to abandon the game in the opening phase due to time constraints, as we were not using a clock, plus we were unsure of some rules, or at least my opponent was unsure how to react to my moving my Lion many turns in a row, I seem to vaguely recall).

[deleted some paragraphs]
...

Fwiw, I once was at the Ottawa home of a player of games such as Go and Shogi, and watched a documentary from Japan, where for an exhibition a huge board was made for a unique one-time Shogi variant between two players, with a few thousand pieces per side used. The game lasted something like 4 days, and the players naturally took breaks, including a whirlpool break together (more than the viewer needed to see or know, IMHO).

I have 2 questions for Fergus:

1) At the moment the "number" of games for the variant "Sac Chess" [i.e. games counted as finished!?] shows as 3, when I believe there have only been 2 finished at this point (and 2 more are currently being played, one of which was by a personal invitation). Is there something I'm missing?


2) Not quite sure this is the right thread to ask under, but in the event that a game is found wanting for any reason, can it be deleted from Game Courier (& by who)? 

A trivial example of why this might be desirable is an old chess variant (using standard chess' setup & piece movement rules) that I once read about in a book. The variant was called something like "Check!", the object of which was to deliver the first (and only) check of the game, winning immediately. It turns out that White wins by force in something like 5 moves if he plays 1.Nc3. Such a variant, if it existed on Game Courier, would be a prime candidate to be deleted, I would think.

I put the following in a wrong thread, so I'll delete it from there, after cutting and pasting it here for anyone who might be interested:

Posted by Kevin Pacey: After an idea occurred to me today, I'm testing out what a possible 3D circular chess variant diagram might look like. It's a 3D "diagram" that's a hybrid sequence of Circular Chess diagrams, albeit of somewhat varying sizes, based on such Circular Chess diagrams that are currently available to me on chessvariants.com. Perhaps an editor may wish to tell me if this 3D "diagram" might be acceptable in any possible future submission (presumably the 3 individual Circular Chess diagrams would line up vertically if in a submission).

Because the (empty) middle circular board has file labels, the location of the pieces & pawns on the other boards could perhaps more easily be referred to by file, too, by naming (with plain text) each piece's coordinates in the Setup section of such a submission. The idea of any variant based on the 3D "diagram" could well be to win by checkmating one of the other player's two kings. I'm still thinking about whether such a variant might even be feasible, but first here's the test, to see if it's even possible to submit such a variant diagram as acceptable:

Board 1:

Board 2:

Board 3:

I've added the following to the end of the Notes section for my Sac Chess submission (to try to, in the most natural way I can imagine to date, accommodate those who dislike there being a single queen and two amazons in the setup position for Sac Chess):

"Note: to accommodate those who dislike the queen being clearly inferior to amazons both in their power AND in their number in Sac Chess at the start of a game, I can suggest the following fairly natural idea for a modified variant ('Royal Bevy Chess'), i.e. it has a similar setup and the same rules as for Sac Chess. Namely, in the setup position for Sac Chess, switch 2 queens for the 2 amazons, and switch an amazon for the single queen. This idea of having two queens and one amazon in a setup position may have first been used in 'Alekhine Chess', which is somewhat similar to Sac Chess, perhaps; here's a link to it:"

http://www.chessvariants.com/index/external.php?itemid=zAlekhineChess

Fwiw, I'd thought of making the Hydra piece type even more powerful, by having it move like both a Pegasus and a Hippo, but in the end I preferred to have certain 'blind spots' (6 of them) in a Hydra's sphere of influence. Not only that, but then the Hydra remains as a thematic compound piece, of just two (IMO) 'basic' piece types, as far as its movements go, namely Pegasus and King.

I've put my tentative estimates for the relative piece values in the Notes section of my Carrousel Chess submission now.

Sorry H.G., I hadn't been in a hurry up till now, and didn't realize you were eager. I wanted to at least see how my 2 games with Carlos were going to develop before getting more adventurous by playing a computer. Looking at our game of Sac Chess, Carlos seems to be doing very well, which doesn't suggest my chances would be good against a program (against a good one, I half expected to score say 1/4, if it would be about 200 rating points higher than my standard chess rating). 

In the meantime, it is becoming more clear to me that looking for a computer-resistant chess variant is a futile exercise, especially now that 19x19 Go computer programs are demonstrably so much stronger than before. I had guessed that it might take up to 100 more years for Go programs to take over and eventually dominate that game, from people.

I also had wanted to try to see my Glinski's Hexagonal Chess game with Carlos to a conclusion, before trying out that link you gave. An irrational concern that I might somehow go wrong and mess up my laptop in some way, before that game had finished, had been with me. Anyway, I'll try to get playing that computer program at Sac Chess soon after my brother & his wife go home tomorrow.