Ratings & Comments

In general, hierarchical Christian religions of the sort that have bishops do not have very high ranking positions for women. So, if you want a piece that is a high-ranked female religious figure that fits with bishop, you're not going to find one. Alternatives include using a neologism like Cardinaless or abandoning one of your requirements for naming the piece. Mixing religious titles from very different religions doesn't work well, because Christianity, from which we get bishops, doesn't easily mix with other religions. Diagonal moving pieces do not always have religious names. For example, the Queen moves diagonally but doesn't have a religious name.

If I may intrude into the discussion of how pieces are named and refer again to my variant 'Chess 66'. We have discussed Chess 66 and clarified inconsistencies. For my part, I have taken up the suggestions in my description by adding explanations and clarifying examples. The functionality of the switches as I imagine it is not compatible with Fergus 'Reroute 66' (occupied switsches can be skipped, switching between fields of switches is possible). This should be discussed. Therefore I would have the request to publish my variant 'Chess 66'. Are there any reasons against it?

Thank you for all your feedbacks.

To Greg, python and heroine carry the same meaning in French and other languages as well. In French is even worse for Heroin, as héroine is the word for both the female hero and the drug.

To Joe, even if I'm French, I'm reluctant to use French words. It is not a solution, it is not good if two different pieces are named with the same word but in two different languages. Although there are (famous) existing cases (Ferz, Alfil, Cavalier, Chevalier, ...)

HG's Pythia is very good. Not all religions are Christian in the span of mankind history and geography. The Pythia was an important person in Greek religion in the Antiquity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia

Yes, Heroine is kind of generic and yes, not very common in usage. I'm not very happy with it.

All that demonstrates that we have progresses to make for the gender issue :=)

The preset under Official Glinski Coordinates, Medium Size Pieces is not rendering properly. You can see the problem in this game

Hi Jean-Louis.

For what it's worth, 'heroine' is often used over here in movie reviews, to describe a character that's the leading lady (and/or helper of some sort to the male 'hero'). I mentioned Joe's 'Hero' piece type since he chose the name for it in spite of any misgivings that it might possibly be a bit generic.

Sometimes it's easy to be over- (or under-) critical of one's own ideas, especially on second thought. I think 'heroine' is just fine for RNF type.

This is probably related to some changes I made to the formfields_customization.php script for something unrelated to hexagonal chess. I got it to use the vhex shape again, but when I do, the pieces are misaligned with the CSS board, and the board appears misshapen when it is automatically drawn as an image. So, something else is going wrong. Since it's late, I'll look into this further tomorrow.

Yes Zillions overestimates hoppers and ranks the Cannon slightly below the Rook, and the Vao slightly below the Bishop, and the Leo slightly below the Queen, which is really excessive for the 3 of them.

I just found that Ivan Derzhanski was calling this piece a Dragon in his study made in 2001.

http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/whos-who-on-8x8.html

Consensus values for pieces in Xiangqi are R=10, C=6-4 (opening-endgame), H=4-6, A=E=2, P=1-3 (unpassed/passed). So C and H only approximately half a Rook, and it depends on the game phase which of the two is somewhat stronger. And one should realize here that the Horse (Mao) is only worth half an orthodox Knight on a board as crowded as orthodox chess. (Which is quite a bit more crowded than Xiangqi, so that extrapolating the Xiangqi values to that higher density might give H=3 and C=7. That would then imply N=6, which indeed gives the correct relative value of R and N. So this suggests C could be worth slightly more than a Knight in a FIDE context.)

In games without drops the opening value of pieces is dominated by what they will be worth in the end-game. E.g. it is still much better to have a Rook in the opening than a Bishop or Knight, even though a Rook on a crowded board trapped behind his own Pawns is hardly of any use at all. But it is almost unavoidable that it will get to express its true power later in the game, so that hanging on to it is a good strategy. But for Cannons the end-game value is low, and rather than waiting for their potential to develop with time, one should try to trade them in the most-favorable way before that time.

To do a meaningful empirical test of the Cannon value you would need to do it with an engine that handles it well. Otherwise the value will be underestimated. ("A piece is as strong as the hand that wields it.") And handling hoppers well means you have to be very much aware when it becomes time to exchange them for other minors. If you do that too early you would not have exploited any superiority while it still existed; if you do it too late you will be stuck with them when they get nearly useless. To make the program seek trading at the right moment it is essential that it makes the hopper value dependent on the piece density, in the correct way. Which would have too be determined empirically too.

For anyone who's interested, I wrote up a rulebook PDF for Bombalot.

The rules are based upon the Sir Bombalot ruleset, that I have fond memories playing back around 2000, but I mention the differences breakout boxes throughout.

Paul

Hi, I made my own Chess variant, that I call Cathayan Chess. Is there anything we can do about it?

I now see that you were using the unprogrammed preset that actually uses a custom grid rather than the vhex shape. So, I was going in the wrong direction when I tried to make it use the vhex shape. So, the problem is different than I thought it was, and I will have to start over. In the meantime, I have reverted it back to the custom grid shape.

help. i can't create an account

Thank you!

If we're talking prior usage, it's worth mentioning that Valkyrie has at least three distinct usages already: A queen that can also relocate friendly pieces, Bishop capturing as Queen, and a 3D‐specific piece moving as Rook or jumping two steps on either kind of diagonal. Conversely Heroine (albeit perhaps due to potential Drug associations) is afaict only used by Gilman for a Hex‐prism‐specific compound

Fwiw, Gilman also uses Hero on that last page, and there's also a Hero in Hero Chess. Surprisingly, Gilman seems to lack names for the two pieces under discussion (Knight+Chatelaine/Primate, to use his terminology) though. I suppose one could suggest Catholicos for BWN, as a rank above cardinal that starts with Ca‐ (for the usual extrapolations: Zetholicos ⁊c), but besides the long and awkward Archchancellor (note the double ⟨ch⟩) idk what he'd've used for the RFN

Pythia seems to be unused (understandably, given its relative obscurity); arguably it falls afoul of Fergus' objection to multiple ‘popesses’, as there was only one Pythia at a time, but as Jean‐Louis notes, if we can have two Sissas…

Imo Popess feels a bit awkward as a word, and I share Jean‐Louis' reservations re unnecessary loanwords; Pythia, Valkyrie, Heroine, and Baroness all sound fine to me

Perhaps that's where Daniil Frolov got it from?

I've found a few other uses since writing this page (including one in JWB's Meta‐Chess) but haven't yet decided to update it; perhaps some time soon

but as Jean‐Louis notes, if we can have two Sissas…

Sissa is a name borrowed from a person's name, in this case a mythical inventor of Chess. Presumably, the piece is not understood to be this very mythical inventor of Chess but is just named in his honor. This is different than a title for a rank that is allowed to only one person at a time within a given hierarchy.

https://samiam.org/chessv continues to host the ChessV software, and, indeed, has been updated to have version 2.2 of ChessV. Should chessv.org ever go down, this is an alternate download link.