🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Nov 13, 2019 04:44 PM UTC:
Using the Zillions-of-Games version of Marseillais Chess by Young-Hyun Joo, I moved pieces until I got a position where one side used the first move to move into a position with no second move. When I tried to move again, it declared the game a draw.
While I generally don't like the idea of a player being able to draw a game by stalemating himself, it is also a difficult thing to do until the endgame, and giving each player two moves should normally allow the player who is ahead to force checkmate all the more quickly. So, in this game, it may mitigate the greater advantage of the player who is ahead and give the player who is behind greater hope of being able to draw the game without really making the game too drawish.
This rule comes from a reading of Pritchard, and given how he mangled all of my games that ended up in the revised version of his Encyclopedia, I don't trust him. But he is also the only source I have. I would like to find the article written by Fortis, but it may not be on the web. Since I don't have a serious objection to it, and since it is computationally less expensive than some other options, I'll probably go with it unless someone has a more authoritative historical source than Pritchard.
Checking how en passant works in the same Zillions script, it works as I have programmed it except that it allows the capture of two pieces when a piece has moved to the space a pawn just passed over with its double move. I suspect that if capturing two pieces at once were allowed, this would have been mentioned explicitly in the rules. My interpretation is that since en passant means "in passing," the idea is that an en passant capture happens during the pawn's move and not after another move. In that case, the new piece would not yet be on that space when the en passant capture actually happens, and a double capture would not be possible then. Given this, a pawn who captured by en passant on that space should itself be captured, leaving the piece that moved to that space still standing. But this would overcomplicate the game, and it is easier to say that moving the piece there caused the enemy pawn to lose its chance to capture by en passant but compensated for this by giving it another piece to capture. So, I don't support allowing double captures.
Using the Zillions-of-Games version of Marseillais Chess by Young-Hyun Joo, I moved pieces until I got a position where one side used the first move to move into a position with no second move. When I tried to move again, it declared the game a draw.
While I generally don't like the idea of a player being able to draw a game by stalemating himself, it is also a difficult thing to do until the endgame, and giving each player two moves should normally allow the player who is ahead to force checkmate all the more quickly. So, in this game, it may mitigate the greater advantage of the player who is ahead and give the player who is behind greater hope of being able to draw the game without really making the game too drawish.
This rule comes from a reading of Pritchard, and given how he mangled all of my games that ended up in the revised version of his Encyclopedia, I don't trust him. But he is also the only source I have. I would like to find the article written by Fortis, but it may not be on the web. Since I don't have a serious objection to it, and since it is computationally less expensive than some other options, I'll probably go with it unless someone has a more authoritative historical source than Pritchard.
Checking how en passant works in the same Zillions script, it works as I have programmed it except that it allows the capture of two pieces when a piece has moved to the space a pawn just passed over with its double move. I suspect that if capturing two pieces at once were allowed, this would have been mentioned explicitly in the rules. My interpretation is that since en passant means "in passing," the idea is that an en passant capture happens during the pawn's move and not after another move. In that case, the new piece would not yet be on that space when the en passant capture actually happens, and a double capture would not be possible then. Given this, a pawn who captured by en passant on that space should itself be captured, leaving the piece that moved to that space still standing. But this would overcomplicate the game, and it is easier to say that moving the piece there caused the enemy pawn to lose its chance to capture by en passant but compensated for this by giving it another piece to capture. So, I don't support allowing double captures.