Ratings & Comments

The Heroine and Popess piece types in this variant arguably (nicely) complete the combination of compound pieces I used in my own (earlier) 10x10 Sac Chess variant.

On the topic of piece names, I've noticed that in some languages the name for a chess rook translates to ship (or to boat, also). Thus 'Admiral' (or my choice of 'Sailor', in Sac Chess) gets bonus points as a choice of name, perhaps (for the piece type in question, a promoted rook in shogi), i.e. a person who uses a watercraft's power.

Maybe there's a slightly related argument that a real-life knight, in the past, is a person who uses a horse (arguably knight is a more elevated title than horseman, which would also work).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rook_(chess)#Name_translations

This page is done too. It sends to a Game Courier preset with enforced rules for Wild Tamerlane. It could replace an existing page with the same title, https://www.chessvariants.com/play/wild-tamerlane-chess, which points to a Game Courier Present not coded with no rules enforced.

Thanks

This page is done. I believe it can be opened up for the public. Thanks.

Why can't I delete this Page?

I can receive emails from the site just fine. The problem is there's no way to get it verified.

Although I couldn't receive the required email, I cheated by looking at the undelivered email sent to chessvariants.com. Using the code provided in that email, I was able to verify my email address after I fixed some bugs in the change_password.php script. Basically, I had misnamed some columns by reversing the order of the two words composing their names. So, if you can get the email, you should now be able to verify your address.

They will only be empty until an editor approves them.

I have specially created a Yahoo account for the verification of my email address. It happens exactly what Máté Csarmasz described before. The verification simply does not work. In my person information the Yahoo address is still declared as unverified.

A while ago, I looked at 31 possible short range pieces. I have now expanded this research.

I have written a small C program which looks at all 16,777,215 possible leapers that move at most two squares. Some findings:

• I expected around half of all possible pieces to be colorbound in some way. Wrong. 16,452,080 (over 98%) pieces are not colorbound.
• There are 104 non-colorbound pieces with three moves, 2,512 pieces with four moves, and some 2,696,337 pieces with 12 moves.
• Only 2,944 possible pieces are Bishop colorbound: These relatively few pieces can go to the same 32 squares a Bishop can go to.

With some 16,452,080 non-colorbound pieces, if we replace the knight, bishop, and queen with a random non-colorbound short leaper, that gives us 4,453,099,898,116,838,912,000 which is, what, 4 hextillion possible variants, and that’s keeping the king, pawns, and rook.

OK, if that’s not enough possible variants, we can also add the ability for a given random piece to be able to be a rider in any direction it can leap (e.g. a fers-rider is our bishop; a wazir-rider is a rook, and a knight-rider is, well, a knightrider), where we randomly choose, from all the moves a given leaper has, for it to be able to ride in a random number of directions. For example, if we look at the wazir, then randomly choose which directions it moves like a rook and which directions it can only move one square, we get 16 possible pieces. If we do this for all 16,452,080 non-colorbound short range pieces, we get some 282,232,643,280 possible pieces, just over 2 to the power of 38 (2^38 or 2 ** 38 in Python notation).

This means an 8x8 board with random non-colorbound pieces and using a standard chess set has some 6,344,961,231,517,063,209,074,884,200,517,463,972,290,560,000 possible variants (the pawns and kings can keep their moves), just over 2 to the power of 152.

@Fergus,

I verified Máté's email address and set emailVerified in the database to 1 but I'm told he is still getting messages from Game Courier when making moves that his address is not verified. What am I missing?

The other preset seems to have a problem also. In this game the hexagon alignment switched from vertical to horizontal after the first move and won't go back.

Thanks. I got your email and replied.

Hello, Is there a way to verify my email address? csarmi

I have also created dummy berolina pawns and made the trick for them, too!

What about Falcon-like pieces involving a Rumbaba or other HD component? Especially now that George Duke’s patent on these pieces has expired, so you’re free to make “Falkeschach”. (I also want to see more Rhino-like pieces that mix all 3 of Rookwise, Bishopwise, and Unicornwise steps (of course having a 3MD instead of an EMD); the first one of which has a Fortnightwise 3MD on a cubic board, and therefore could be called “Fortrhino”.)

My suggestion for the Chevron version of the Falcon would be Warlobird. (Which also allows a suffix for pieces mixing oblique moves like how the Falcon family mixes radial moves: for example, a Gnubird would mix Knight and Camel moves.)

Thanks, Sam. This is not too bad... I gather my algorithm was correct, but I assumed that the positions would be numbered 1-960 (as people count), not 0-959 (as programmers count). In fact, it looks like I just add one at the end after placing the pieces. Not sure where I got that - it's unlikely I just made it up, but it does seem that the consensus is to number the positions starting at 0. Anyway, easy fix.

Which of the two possible stepping Fortnights do you mean?

• The one taking one each of wazir, ferz, and viceroy steps? Given that Gilman starts from the various bent/crooked pieces which only have two kinds of step, this is probably a bit out of scope (corkscrew pieces with one kind of step aside).
• The one taking three Ferz steps, two in one direction and one at 60° (dual to the hex Shearwater)? That'd match the two‐of‐one‐and‐one‐of‐the‐other pattern of the Falcon, and arguably as a Shearwater extrapolation could be nameworthy (I'd've suggested Fulmar, a family of birds related to shearwaters beginning with the F of fortnight as shearwater begins with the S of sennight, but it's already taken (albeit with unclear etymology) for Zephyr+Lama; perhaps Petrel, the group including the fulmars and still beginning with a labial consonant, would suit it?), but presumably he either didn't consider two diagonal directions different enough without the AltOrth‐ness, or it just didn't occur to him. And there are also Nonstandard Diagonals at small enough angles (35°) for more Falcon‐like pieces there too

For a stepping‐Trison component I'd probably choose the former, but individually both are interesting enough imo. There's still a few bird‐of‐prey names unused I think so if one were keen to name them in Gilmanesque fashion all that'd remain would be finding a game to use them in…

@HG, I had managed to do it despite some small setbacks. You know what's funny? This game also has berolina pawns!

I don't think this is a bug. At most it is a missing feature. Greg usually takes care of these but he probably not knew the rule.

These presets are all broken. They each have a 'conserve' command in the post move 1 section.

The Falcon is a generalization of the Korean Elephant.

I Fixed a word

Promotes to 'Scepter' -> Promotes to 'Kangaroo'

I don’t know the correct procedure to file a bug report for ChessV, so I will just note the bug here.

Description of bug

ChessV does not use the standard Chess960 numbering scheme for opening setups. See https://chess960.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/chess960-starting-positions.pdf for the reference of correct number to starting position. In particular, ChessV is off by one (Position 0 in the official spec is position 1 in ChessV, etc.)

Steps to reproduce

Open up ChessV. Choose Fischer Random Chess. When it asks for an expected setup, choose setup #692.

Expected results

The opening setup should be RBBQKNNR (Mongredien chess)

Actual results

The setup is BRQKNNRB

Notes

Position 693 is the Mongredien setup in ChessV, so one just needs to add 1 to the official position number to get the corresponding position in ChessV.

Position 518 (519 in ChessV) is the standard chess starting position.

This is my attempt to put a chess variant on a non-standard tiling. While the hex tiling has been fairly extensively explored for chess variants, and there are a few games using a triangle tiling, and Tony Paletta has explored the rhombille tiling, and George Dekle has explored a few tilings, this is the first chess variant I know of that uses a demi-regular tiling (Onyx, a Hex-style connection game, uses a similar archimedean tiling).

Any comments or civil criticism is welcomed.

Until this variant gets published, guests can see a Zillions implementation of the game is at Zillions of Games; that zip file includes a PDF with full game rules.

https://samiam.org/chessv continues to host the ChessV software, and, indeed, has been updated to have version 2.2 of ChessV. Should chessv.org ever go down, this is an alternate download link.

@Bn Em: thank you for your comments. Quite informative. About Heroin, drug or female hero, I was sure that it was a link. According to WP:

The head of Bayer's research department reputedly coined the drug's new name of "heroin," based on the German heroisch which means "heroic, strong" (from the ancient Greek word "heros, ήρως").

To be back on this debate on BWN and RFN, I hesitate between Popess/Heroin which are a bit generic or Pythia/Valkyrie which are more strongly culturally marked.

At this moment, although I like the second pair, I prefer to stick with the first couple because it will be easier to use in an other CV where a Greek or a Viking reference could be awkward. I think that Popess and Heroin do carry what I wanted them to carry, the idea of being at the top of a pyramid, being feminine, one link to spiritual, one link to physical strength. They are immediately understandable.

Sure, they are not very common words, but BWN and RFN are not very common in CVs either.

Perhaps that's where Daniil Frolov got it from?

I've found a few other uses since writing this page (including one in JWB's Meta‐Chess) but haven't yet decided to update it; perhaps some time soon

If we're talking prior usage, it's worth mentioning that Valkyrie has at least three distinct usages already: A queen that can also relocate friendly pieces, Bishop capturing as Queen, and a 3D‐specific piece moving as Rook or jumping two steps on either kind of diagonal. Conversely Heroine (albeit perhaps due to potential Drug associations) is afaict only used by Gilman for a Hex‐prism‐specific compound

Fwiw, Gilman also uses Hero on that last page, and there's also a Hero in Hero Chess. Surprisingly, Gilman seems to lack names for the two pieces under discussion (Knight+Chatelaine/Primate, to use his terminology) though. I suppose one could suggest Catholicos for BWN, as a rank above cardinal that starts with Ca‐ (for the usual extrapolations: Zetholicos ⁊c), but besides the long and awkward Archchancellor (note the double ⟨ch⟩) idk what he'd've used for the RFN

Pythia seems to be unused (understandably, given its relative obscurity); arguably it falls afoul of Fergus' objection to multiple ‘popesses’, as there was only one Pythia at a time, but as Jean‐Louis notes, if we can have two Sissas…

Imo Popess feels a bit awkward as a word, and I share Jean‐Louis' reservations re unnecessary loanwords; Pythia, Valkyrie, Heroine, and Baroness all sound fine to me

Thank you!

help. i can't create an account

I took some steps to prevent the image from tiling, and now it will also work with the GIF, PNG, and JPG rendering methods.

You could post a description of the rules on this website.

https://www.chessvariants.com/how.html

For anyone who's interested, I wrote up a rulebook PDF for Bombalot.

The rules are based upon the Sir Bombalot ruleset, that I have fond memories playing back around 2000, but I mention the differences breakout boxes throughout.

Paul

Consensus values for pieces in Xiangqi are R=10, C=6-4 (opening-endgame), H=4-6, A=E=2, P=1-3 (unpassed/passed). So C and H only approximately half a Rook, and it depends on the game phase which of the two is somewhat stronger. And one should realize here that the Horse (Mao) is only worth half an orthodox Knight on a board as crowded as orthodox chess. (Which is quite a bit more crowded than Xiangqi, so that extrapolating the Xiangqi values to that higher density might give H=3 and C=7. That would then imply N=6, which indeed gives the correct relative value of R and N. So this suggests C could be worth slightly more than a Knight in a FIDE context.)

In games without drops the opening value of pieces is dominated by what they will be worth in the end-game. E.g. it is still much better to have a Rook in the opening than a Bishop or Knight, even though a Rook on a crowded board trapped behind his own Pawns is hardly of any use at all. But it is almost unavoidable that it will get to express its true power later in the game, so that hanging on to it is a good strategy. But for Cannons the end-game value is low, and rather than waiting for their potential to develop with time, one should try to trade them in the most-favorable way before that time.

To do a meaningful empirical test of the Cannon value you would need to do it with an engine that handles it well. Otherwise the value will be underestimated. ("A piece is as strong as the hand that wields it.") And handling hoppers well means you have to be very much aware when it becomes time to exchange them for other minors. If you do that too early you would not have exploited any superiority while it still existed; if you do it too late you will be stuck with them when they get nearly useless. To make the program seek trading at the right moment it is essential that it makes the hopper value dependent on the piece density, in the correct way. Which would have too be determined empirically too.

I just found that Ivan Derzhanski was calling this piece a Dragon in his study made in 2001.

http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/whos-who-on-8x8.html

Yes Zillions overestimates hoppers and ranks the Cannon slightly below the Rook, and the Vao slightly below the Bishop, and the Leo slightly below the Queen, which is really excessive for the 3 of them.

This is probably related to some changes I made to the formfields_customization.php script for something unrelated to hexagonal chess. I got it to use the vhex shape again, but when I do, the pieces are misaligned with the CSS board, and the board appears misshapen when it is automatically drawn as an image. So, something else is going wrong. Since it's late, I'll look into this further tomorrow.

Hi Jean-Louis.

For what it's worth, 'heroine' is often used over here in movie reviews, to describe a character that's the leading lady (and/or helper of some sort to the male 'hero'). I mentioned Joe's 'Hero' piece type since he chose the name for it in spite of any misgivings that it might possibly be a bit generic.

Sometimes it's easy to be over- (or under-) critical of one's own ideas, especially on second thought. I think 'heroine' is just fine for RNF type.

The preset under Official Glinski Coordinates, Medium Size Pieces is not rendering properly. You can see the problem in this game

Thank you for all your feedbacks.

To Greg, python and heroine carry the same meaning in French and other languages as well. In French is even worse for Heroin, as héroine is the word for both the female hero and the drug.

To Joe, even if I'm French, I'm reluctant to use French words. It is not a solution, it is not good if two different pieces are named with the same word but in two different languages. Although there are (famous) existing cases (Ferz, Alfil, Cavalier, Chevalier, ...)

HG's Pythia is very good. Not all religions are Christian in the span of mankind history and geography. The Pythia was an important person in Greek religion in the Antiquity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythia

Yes, Heroine is kind of generic and yes, not very common in usage. I'm not very happy with it.

All that demonstrates that we have progresses to make for the gender issue :=)

If I may intrude into the discussion of how pieces are named and refer again to my variant 'Chess 66'. We have discussed Chess 66 and clarified inconsistencies. For my part, I have taken up the suggestions in my description by adding explanations and clarifying examples. The functionality of the switches as I imagine it is not compatible with Fergus 'Reroute 66' (occupied switsches can be skipped, switching between fields of switches is possible). This should be discussed. Therefore I would have the request to publish my variant 'Chess 66'. Are there any reasons against it?

While I'm pretty inactive these days, I do play the occasional game, and when I check for moves, I check what's new. First, thank you Kevin for pointing out names I've already used for pieces.

For your tentative 'high priestess', I think "grande prêtresse" is possibly a good choice.

Similarly, for 'hero' I think "héros" with both the accent and ending "s" is a decent choice.

The accents in the names mark them as non-English, and the spellings maintain the separation of your and my pieces without really changing the names you wished. I admit that I am naming deficient and no one except me may actually like the alternates, so feel free to ignore or delete this post.