Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Can one castle under or through check, now there is no check?
(Zillions' own zrf keeps castling as usual, but it's no proof,
since their zrf for Berolina Chess has no en passant.)

Thanks to R. Wayne Schmittberger for the following answer to the above
question:


I don't remember the castling question being asked before, or being 
settled. But I think that it would be in keeping with the spirit of the 
game to allow castling when in check, as well as to allow castling 
through check. For the same reason, it should be legal to move into 
check, even though your opponent can then win by taking your king.

R. Wayne Schmittberger

I am not 100% sure about how castling should be handled. The game carries
very natural notions of check (last piece of a kind under attack) and
checkmate (unavoidable check). So castling under check hurts the eye a
bit, unless one has a second (promoted) king. But if one forbids castling
under or through check, one should also forbid castling when the rook is
attacked when it is the only rook on board. I played correspondence games
in the NOST association and there castling under check was allowed, as
Wayne Schmittberger recommends.
Still, I would rather recommend to disable castling completely. But of
course, the inventor gets precedence over my opinion :-)
One must be conscious that another feature of not wanting to talk about
check and checkmate is that stalemate becomes a win for the stalemating
player, because the opponent is forced to commit suicide. This one
doesn't bother me at all, since I dislike the stalemate rule anyway.

'DEF,LargeCV': Excellent ideation, average playability. (The
extinction-notion could apply to those CVs >71 (or >79) squares, the
subject matter of this cross-thread.)

Also, I've just thought of the following pathological possibility. Suppose that, after 41 moves of a game of Extinction Chess, White's only Pawn is on b7 and Black's only Bishop is on c8. If White then plays 42. bxc8=Q, Black's Bishops are extinct, but so are White's Pawns. So the game is clearly over, but what is the result?

I agree that such a position is very unlikely -- presumably it's unusual for a game of Extinction Chess even to last so long -- but it's not inconceivable. If the ruling had been for a draw, then one could imagine a game in which Black had no winning chances, but could force a draw by moving the Bishop to c8, forcing the Pawn to promote or die.

On the other hand, since the capture-promotion has been declared a win for White, it seems that the position as I stated it could arise only after an obvious blunder by Black. But of course the Black piece need not be a Bishop. One could imagine White pushing his last Pawn to the 7th rank, forking Black's last Rook and Knight.

Anyway, here's the Game Courier preset I made for this.

extinction chess is also played on schemingmind.com & even links back to
this very page here on CV .org

Extinction Chess
Rules
Invented by R. Wayne Schmittberger and added here with his permission.

More information on Extinction Chess is available on ChessVariants.org
[ http://www.chessvariants.org/winning.dir/extinction.html ]

Of course they don't happen at the same time; the game ends the moment the bishop is captured. A pawn doesn't promote until its owner says what it promotes to.

Of course they don't happen at the same time; the game ends the moment the bishop is captured. A pawn doesn't promote until its owner says what it promotes to.

The rules in the article already resolve the dilemma according to that interpretation; the Rules section says:

If a player promotes his last Pawn, he loses (as his Pawns are now extinct), unless he wins by extinction on that very move.

I don't know if that is something that was added later. It is the opposit from what we have in Atomic Chess, where it is forbidden to blow up your own royal, even if that takes out the opponent's one. In Tenjiku Shogi it is also possible to destroy both royals in the same move, by capturing a King that stands next to a Fire Demon with your own King. The historic rules don't mention what would happen in that case (as it of course never happens in practice).