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Hi H.G.

Just glancing at your tutorial for the Applet (which I seem to recall is necessary to read, to make an Interactive diagram from scratch), it seems it's not just a matter of moving the pieces - it seems all sorts of special steps/reading is needed besides, unless I'm not getting my head around the instructions (which are lengthy and, for me anyway, a non-techie and non-betza-code-familiar-type, hard to see how they are carried out on a step-by-step basis). Maybe I did not try hard enough to comprehend the tutorial, though.

If no one provides code for an Interactive Diagram after some time I may just take a stab at it myself though, and if necessary ask for your assistance. However, at the moment Wide Nightrider Chess is the only CV (at least with a rules page) that I have left that I think may be worth having a rules enforcing preset for, in the near future anyway. Haru has just done an Interactive Diagram for it, showing it is indeed possible to do (and fairly quickly!), at least for some adept folks who may have a less foggy brain than I. As an aside, I'd rather be thinking about making more submissions (easier but more work perhaps) than making just one or two rules enforcing presets, but not one of ten submissions I have in the pipeline has been approved or commented on by editor(s), who are in short supply.

@ Haru:

If you could post the 'code' for the Interactive Diagram you just made for Wide Nightrider Chess, I'd be grateful.

Regards to you both, Kevin

Fergus and I just replaced the method he recommended against by something that doesn't have the problems you observed when not actually playing. For you the only difference is that the custom piece assignment the Applet proposes should not be pasted at the end of the Pre-Game section in the preset, but in a (new) text entry there  called Custom Set. (What has to be pasted is also different, but the Applet takes care of that, so it should not concern you.

I don't understand why you would be dependent on someone else to make an Interactive Diagram first. You apparently already went through the piece table to conclude the required pieces are there. Is it really to hard for you to move these pieces from the table to the board, is it just laziness, or is it a matter of principle that you want others to work for you?

This (Wide Nightrider Chess) variant of mine was a bit popular for a time, but I suspect at least some/many/most GC players may have wanted a rules-enforcement preset for it. The Play-Test Applet apparently (still) can be used to generate an Interactive Diagram for it, if someone successfully attempts to make one, as the Applet handles all the piece-types in its piece type table, and allows a 12x10 board, as well as accommodating my Fast Castling (or Omega Chess Pawn) rules.

Not sure I could then generate a preset from an Interactive Diagram for it the way I did for Butterfly Chess (after H.G.'s recent changes to the Applet), i.e. in a way that Fergus recommended against (for good reasons I'm sure), but that way was simple enough at least for me...

@ David

For Wide Nightrider Chess I wanted the Nightriders to start on the back ranks of the setup, plus not that many pieces added, so I didn't have the pawns on the 3rd ranks of each side in the setup - here's a later CV of mine that did do so, with a bigger army for each side (it was not based on TenCubed Chess, but might have been):

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/wide-soho-chess

edit: Here's another 12x10 CV, this one by J-L Cazaux:

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/very-heavy-chess

edit2: Yet another 12x10 CV (maybe the most popular one!?), by E Greenwood:

https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/renaiss.html

A 12x10 board can be a lot of fun - and short range pieces are still reasonably effective. Also, placing the pawns on the 3rd and 8th ranks leaves room to set up the "nonpawn" pieces of any army you are trying out on the Diagram testing thread, including your latest (24x8) variant Bureau-Spiel.

Note that a Ferz starting on (a1) can reach any square of the same color on an 8x8 board in seven moves or less. But a Knight on (a1) requires seven moves to reach (o8). While Bishops will be making moves like a3-f8-m1-p4. I fear that, at best, late middle game and endgame values on a 16x8 board will look something like:

Pawn = 1, Woody Rook (WD) = 2, Knight = 2, Elephant (FA) = 2.25, Man (FW) = 2.50, Bishop = 3, Rook = 6, (RN) = 9 and Queen = 10 points. Also, even assigning a generous 4.5 points to the Crowned Bishop and 7.5 points to the Crowned Rook, together these fine pieces are only worth a pair of Rooks. The Raven (RNN) might be worth trying on a 16x8 board.

"David Paulowich wrote on 2023-02-18 UTC [1] Adding "Nightrider" and "Modern Elephant" Tags to your games, as appropriate, will help to attract more readers.

[2] My Elephant (AmD) in Shatranj Kamil (64) is one-half of a Champion (WAD), moving to eight empty Squares and attacking four of them. But you probably want a piece that reaches more than 25 percent of the board.

[3] I had no idea how rarely my King's Leap Rule appears in chess variants. I authored a Zillions of Games file called King's Leap Chess that was never "zipped" - contains readable text. I notice Contemporary Random Chess using both a strange form of castling and the (sideways only) King's Bunker Leap, which cannot move over a square that is either occupied or under attack by an enemy piece. That page also has a link to the King to Bunker Leap page, by Charles Daniel in 2009."

I've added tags extensively to my rules pages (sometimes even preset pages), as well as to many of other people's games (particularly those I know I like). There seems to be very few folks tagging pages anymore otherwise, at this point in time. A future issue might be, if everyone tags practically everything in the Alphabetical Index, we're almost right back where we started (if you see what I mean). :)

The King's Leap rule was used historically, but somehow got abandoned - maybe people were glad to connect the rooks while bringing the K to safety, while still giving the other side a sporting chance vs. the K before it might castle the modern FIDE way (or other mild deviations from it, in the case of CVs), it seems. However, in FIDE chess at elite level, even, Black cannot always take getting castled for granted, while White can pretty much, due to White's birthright initiative (I read a Grandmaster wrote such, somewhere).

In the case of my own Fast Castling rule (first used in my 12x8 Wide Chess), the CV inventions I've used it in so far have largely remained little (or un-) played - Wide Nightrider Chess has been played the most so far, yet I suspect it's mostly because a lot of people like to try playing with Nightriders. Otherwise, some sort of a King's Leap rule (like Fast Castling) is especially useful for wide board CVs (another solution is to move the rooks closer to the middle, but people are conservative about that too, besides not using conventional castling, it seems to me).

edit: link to Wide Chess rules page:

https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/wide-chess

edit: list of logs for finished Wide Nightrider Chess games:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/logs.php?age=0&stat=any&gamewcp=Wide+Nightrider+Chess

There were precedents for my Fast Castling rule. One CV had K's leap-castling in spite of pieces in-between, say on the 1st rank, while another had castling as usual, except castling through an attacked cell was allowed. Neither CV was much played so far, though. Did people balk? Maybe the CVs had other things people didn't like about them.

edit: added in 2 links re: CVs I mentioned:

https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/quinquereme.html

https://www.chessvariants.com/large.dir/21st-century-chess.html

I have a high number of CV ideas on the drawing board, but almost all use Fast Castling rules, so I'm afraid to eventually submit them all unless a few games that use that rule become more popular first.

[1] Adding "Nightrider" and "Modern Elephant" Tags to your games, as appropriate, will help to attract more readers.

[2] My Elephant (AmD) in Shatranj Kamil (64) is one-half of a Champion (WAD), moving to eight empty Squares and attacking four of them. But you probably want a piece that reaches more than 25 percent of the board.

[3] I had no idea how rarely my King's Leap Rule appears in chess variants. I authored a Zillions of Games file called King's Leap Chess that was never "zipped" - contains readable text. I notice Contemporary Random Chess using both a strange form of castling and the (sideways only) King's Bunker Leap, which cannot move over a square that is either occupied or under attack by an enemy piece. That page also has a link to the King to Bunker Leap page, by Charles Daniel in 2009.

No, actually that is the Camel value, I just didn't mean to list it.  I was putting together the values for Janus Kamil Chess at the same time (also 12x10) so that's how it slipped in.

Interesting. Instead of Camel, did you mean the fighting value of a king? The Camel is not a piece type included in this variant.

Here are my estimates of the piece values:

Actually the betza mobility is what I had in mind :)! But I had not took the time to calculate.

I changed the checkering pattern of the settings file as you suggested, Greg.

Regarding the value of the champion on 12x10 vs. that of the bishop, my way of estimating it gives some weight to larger board size affecting long range pieces well, while short range pieces not so well. As always, people are naturally free to feel skeptical of my (or other people's) assigned values to piece types, which in my case I write that they are only tentative estimates (derived often from unproven formulae of mine and/or other people's)..

The Game Courier preset has been posted.  Might I suggest, though, that you use 3 square colors.  This makes the knightrider moves much easier to visualize.  (Use "checker pattern" of "10.21." - this will alternate between the first and third colors for the dark squares.)

Regarding Champion vs. Bishop - on 12x10 the Bishop has a Betza mobility of 5.07 while the Champion is at 6.70.  These are the values when the board is at 30% occupancy - which seems to work well for Chess, but Chess starts out at a board density of 50%.  Wide Nightrider starts with a densite of 40%, so calculating the mobility at 20% may be more appropriate.  This yields 5.80 for the Bishop, the Champion still at 6.70.  The density of pices on the board needs to get down to 8% before the mobility of the Bishop equals that of the Champion, and even then the Bishop is still colorbound.  So I think there is no doubt that the Champion is stronger.

Note to CVP editor(s):

I've now just finished submitting a preset for this variant.

You're welcome. I've fixed the spelling, I think.

An official comment I saw on the Omega Chess commercial page assessing the strength of the B and CH on its 10x10 board (with 4 extra corner cells, too) was that B=4, CH=4 but it was recommended not to trade B for CH (at least before endgame?). Though I take B=4 or more Pawns always with a grain of salt, even for on such a large board size, the comment fits in with my tentative values as far as having the CH estimated as less than 4, and not quite worth a B, on the larger 12x10 board size of Wide Nightrider Chess, where a B would if anything improve more than the CH in value.

As a crude rule of thumb for chess [variants] in general, at least when cleanly ahead, e.g. a pawn, for no compensation, a FIDE chess master once advised me to normally just trade piece for same piece type, rather than getting into a material imbalance, if merely by numerical point value it seemed a good idea, as we don't know enough about how such imbalances work out in practice always, but a clear pawn ahead is a clear pawn ahead.

Probably the champion is stronger than a bishop.

Thanks for mentioning my thoughts. Also you have misspelled my name :)!