Check out Glinski's Hexagonal Chess, our featured variant for May, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

[Subject Thread] [Add Response]
H. G. Muller wrote on Tue, Oct 7, 2008 01:48 PM EDT:
What other games do you have in mind? Checkers and Go? Bridge and Poker? Of
course any program can be changed to do anything else, but the question is
if this is useful. The current WinBoard is designed for Chess-like games,
and rests on the assumptions that there are only two players, which
alternate turn, in which they move only a single piece to a square that is
empty or occupied by an opponent. 

Normally there are no side effects to a move. The protocol does not
provide a mechanism to specify side effects, it just specifies a From and
a To square. The rare side effects that occur in Chess (castling and e.p.)
are implied. Only for promotions the promotion piece is specified.

For games like Checkers and Go you basically would have to teach WinBoard
what the side effects of the moves are (capture of opponent pieces on
jumping or surrounding), and this would be easier if you were using a
dedicated GUI for Checkers or Go. For games with hexagonal or triangular
boards the required graphics would be so different, that it also makes no
sense to integrate it in the same GUI.