Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

First, the answers:

1. If a relay piece (eg a Relay-Ferz) is empowered by a Doubler, can it relay moves to two other pieces in a single turn?
   • Yes.

2. If a piece is empowered by an enemy Doubler, and uses its first turn to capture that Doubler, does it still get a second turn?
   • Yes.

3. If a Fiery Dragon is empowered by a Doubler, does it burn pieces on the end of each go, or only after the second go?
   • At the end of each go.

4. According to your rules, if the Halmopper captures by a single Grasshopper move, it may then make a series of Grasshopper moves as a second move, possibly ending in a second capture. However if it takes two Grasshopper-leaps to capture on its first move, it cannot make any subsequent move. Is this correct?
   • No. The original phrasing is misleading. A Halmopper may make a complete Halmopper-style series of leaps, resulting in a capture (or any other legal Halmopper move), as the first part of its doubled move. From the destination square, it can make another complete Halmopper move.

Now, the philosophy underlying the answers.

Most of the special effects in this game (that is, actions other than simple movement and capture by displacement) can be described straightforwardly in terms of an “acting piece” that causes something to happen. For example, a Hummingbird that exchanges places with some other piece is the acting piece, but both pieces move. In the case of relay piece, the acting piece doesn't move, but some other piece does.

Two invariable rules in the games in this family are:

• On every turn, there is always a single acting piece, and it is a friendly piece (owned by the player whose turn it is).

• Promotion by the normal mechanism can occur only if the acting piece both moves and ends its turn in the promotion zone.

Doubling, immobilization, and poisoning work in a more complicated manner than the “acting piece” model allows. They have to, because they may be effects of opposing pieces, and an opposing piece can't be the acting piece.

The “latent effects” of doubling, immobilization, and poisoning can be understood by imagining a phase that takes place between the turns of the two players during which the pieces with latent powers distribute “cards” that modify other pieces' normal moves. The algorithm goes like this:

1. All cards from the previous turn are removed.

2. Each piece with a latent effect distributes its cards to the affected places. Some cards (doubling, immobilization) are delivered to the pieces in those places; others are just left in the affected squares (poisoning).

   Distributing cards is not considered an action, so immobilized pieces distribute their cards as usual.

3. Duplicate cards on the same square or in the possession of the same piece are discarded, so that, for example, there is no doubled doubling.

4. The next player's turn takes place. If a piece in possession of a card acts, it obeys the instructions on the card.

5. At the end of the player's turn, each piece located on a space with a card on it must obey the instructions on the card.

The doubling card says to the piece that holds it: after you act (possibly including promoting according to the normal rules!), discard this card, and, if you want, act again.

The immobilizing card says to the piece that holds it: you can't act, except to capture yourself (but you can still be acted upon, and you still have to obey any cards on the space where you're located at the end of the turn).

The poisoning card (which comes in two colors, one for each player) says to the piece on the space where it is located: if you are an enemy of the piece who poisoned this space, remove yourself from the board.

And now the reasoning behind the answers:

1. Because relaying is an action, a doubled relayer can perform it twice if two pieces are in range. (The relayer does not relay a doubled move to the piece it moves.)

   (It would be completely reasonable to formulate relaying in terms of cards, too; you can imagine a card that lets you move as some other piece. But that's not how it works in this game.)

2. Capturing an enemy Doubler doesn't take away the card that that Doubler gave you.

3. The burning that takes place on your turn is actually a capture by approach, and it is an inherent part of each phase of the doubled FiD move. During the interturn phase, the FiD also poisons the spaces around its final destination, but that poison doesn't take effect until the end of the turn.

   (Mutual capture of one FiD approaching another occurs because the moving FiD captures the stationary one by approach, but the poison left by the stationary FiD kills the moving one at the end of the turn.)

4. The Halmopper follows the above algorithm, like every other piece.

   The only complication with the Halmopper is that you can't distinguish a series of noncapturing Halmopper leaps as a single move from the same series split into a double move (after which leap does the split occur?). This gives Zillions fits but should not be a problem for humans.

As far as I know there has never been a complete set of images for the
pieces in Jupiter.  The screenshot gives images of all unpromoted pieces
for the first time, though at lower resolution than individual pieces are
shown elsewhere, but several of the promoted pieces exist only as text.

Would it be possible to release images of all the pieces?

Sorry it's taken me a while to get to this.

I've put all the images for Jupiter (and Scirocco and Typhoon) on github at:

  https://github.com/archontophoenix/chessVariants

This game is good but subject to unnecessary complexity. Maybe it will be better to stick to one that has the pieces, but they have simpler moves and capturing systems. Why not change the move of some pieces to variants of the move of others and similar for the captures?

One answer to the charge of unnecessary complexity in Jupiter is that complexity was the point: I was trying to see just how much I could fit into one game, while still making it feel something like chess.

Another answer is that I wanted to see how the various move geometries and abilities interact. What makes a piece with unconventional abilities more or less valuable? How much does its value depend on its location relative to other pieces on the board, or on the unconventional abilities of those other pieces? To answer questions like these, perhaps the complexity is necessary after all.

Because I've never gotten a computer to play Jupiter, I haven't yet figured out the answer for this particular set of pieces. But Typhoon, which is basically a subset of Jupiter, is a lot of fun.

Hi Adrian, I have a question for you, that is off-topic, but I don't know how else to reach you. On Roger Hare's shogi pages ( http://www.shogi.net/rjhare/chu-shogi/chu-intro.html ), the Chu-Shogi promotion rule is attributed to you. Where did you get this rule from? It is different from what the TSA manual says. (And I think both are wrong...)

Is there any .ZRF file for this game?

There are a lot of pieces here that I want to steal... :)