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Basically in the last game I just played, I was en route to winning the game, when a player resigned JUST to prevent me from picking up a dead king, hereby denying me the first place, such player is scum, and there should be a rule that awards 40 points instead of 20 points if they resign with a dead king still out in play

On the other 4 player group’s Notes this recently (okay, lol not recently) was posted; lazarus_low 28 days agoI suggest that all players be anonymous during the game. That way collusion is impossible ChessCitizen 28 days ago@lazarus_low thats a very good point actually, there seems to quick be situations of ganging up on someone. Especially with checks I do think this is a very good idea and would eliminate much unfortunates presently going on, and then after the totals appear from the finished outcome then we see who played, won, etc.

Recently this rule was implemented: Non-grey dead kings CAN be checkmated to attain +20 points. I would like to hear some motivation of this rule since I have not heard anything of it. It has several implications and to be honest I am missing the benefits. Below is a strange example: In this position, red is in check, but not checkmated since he can block with his rook. Red resigned. Next, blue played a random move (Rxi7) and then the game saw that the red king was checkmated since the gray rook could no longer block the check. Blue was awarded 20 points for the checkmate. Also a bit interesting that the d2 square which is a gray piece was not seen as a possible square to not be a checkmate.

1. 4 Player Chess currently is prone to mouse slips, at least for me and some other players (who answered me in chat). That is why I currently use "click and click" way to move pieces to long distances instead of "drag and drop". This should be fixed. Also when you just click a piece it shifts slightly and then returns back to its place. It should not work this way. Maybe the program expect us to click exactly in the center of the square, who knows. If I click a piece and do not drag it the piece should stay in place without shifting.2. In most cases there are highlighted squares showing the last moves of the players. But sometimes they disappear. In some cases when I click a piece and drag it to a new square I notice that the initial square is not highlighted. So, if I change my mind during making a move and want to return this piece back to move another piece I must recall where was that piece before. 3. In spectator mode there is no indication of the last moves. 4. Players should see if there are some spectators watching the game.5. Would be good to have an option "highlight legal moves".6. There should be an obvious way to distinguish a king of a resigned player. For example, 3 players left. One of them had only the king, no other pieces or pawns. And at one moment he decided to resign. I did not notice that tiny gray message in the left right corner ("player ... resigned") and though that he is still playing. And then was surprised that he does not make a move in his turn. I think the 3rd player also did not notice that, because he did not try to eat that leftover king. If there are other pieces and/or pawns they become gray and we can see that this player left the game. But if there is only a king ... How to understand that? Looking at the timer placed in some of the 4 corners? It should be improved some way.7. The old version of the UI had the players list where we could see their time and score. It was easy to compare. Now we need to look at 4 corners to compare the points and to see who is likely to flag. That is very inconvenient. Should be fixed too. It may be an additional list (sorted by points?) or the old version of the UI.Thanks in advance.

A recent thread, https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/new-checkmate-dead-king-rule, was capped off with following comment: ignoble wrote: We are reverting this back to requiring the king to be captured. We agreed the new rule made positional luck a bigger factor and eliminated some of the risk often involved with capturing a dead king. Thanks for the feedback, guys! This brought to mind a deeper question. Has the development team considered a voluntary "beta-testing" strategy?1) Treat the base URL "chess.com/4-player-chess/" as the "stable release". Though it'd still have the same "this is experimental" disclaimer, the stable release should be a version of the code that's been widely vetted as providing great game-play with minimal bugginess. 2) Release experimental/beta variants to side URLs, e.g. "chess.com/4-player-chess/beta1/". For these beta releases: Publish URLs in these forums (and/or set up an opt-in mail distribution for beta testers) Establish "testing timeframes" for each variant; small windows of time that a lot of beta-testers can aim for (lest a small pool of beta-testers wind up waiting for hours for enough other beta-testers to get games underway) For each beta, publish a clear-cut description of "what's different" and a link to a sub-forum for feedback specifically related to those changes. Unless absolutely necessary (or desired), ensure beta games do not affect users' "stable release" ratings. I think it'd be a mutually-beneficial setup. For dev team, you'd no longer be limited to the current monolithic architecture that forces the rollout & testing of one combination of code & configuration changes at a time. You could whip up rule variants that drastically change fundamental aspects of the current version*, just to get a feel for how they impact play, without risk of suddenly upsetting entire user base with something that proves to be a bad/unworkable change.For end-user community, it allows for a clean separation of two types of end users: beta-testers (the kind of person who'd find inexplicable joy in the opportunity to play a variant that, say, rewards points at random, promotes pawns to pieces of the opponents army, and crashes if any knight captures any queen; just for the opportunity to write up bug reports / feedback after said game), and normal people :-). Based on what I've seen in this forum, I'm sure you'd find a small army of 4PC users who'd be thrilled to take on some beta-testing (especially if the "stable" version remained accessible for taking a break from test mode). Conversely, most end users would be happiest to use a stable variant (rarely buggy and where changes of behavior are infrequent and broadly considered "improvements") exclusively. * In the thread that inspired this, one such proposal that I'd endorsed was an idea of doing away with checks/checkmates/stalemate entirely... definitely the kind of drastic change that you'd want ample feedback on before unleashing it on the community as a whole.

I found a bug in 4 player chess while im doing a video recording. or did i miss something here? and this is not the only bugs i experiences since last night i end up to many mouse slip because im using the left mouse to show the arrow in the board then suddenly my pieces moves in that direction. its around 5:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8Ub7SAbzhU&feature=youtu.be

I saw it posted but just got a game dropped we were about 10-15 moves into it no one took any pieces all 0 score. Game just ended Poof and we all ended up with 10 points and it said no one won. I heard a bleep right before it stopped the same one that say someone would hear after a person resigned but did not see anything that would indicate someone did and there was no reason for anyone to do so at that time no real advantage.

The points system has caused much confusion. We've seen multiple posts from people wondering why they didn't win when they were the last man standing, or complaining that they should have won. And it's true: the points system is not the way you would intuitively expect a four-player game to work. On the other hand, we do need some incentive for people to come out and fight instead of sitting back in a defensive position and waiting for everyone else to fight; otherwise you have a boring game where everyone just shuffles their pieces back and forth. Despite its drawbacks, the points system provides that. However, I have an idea that is easy to understand, easy to implement, would eliminate the points system and allow us to go back to last-man-standing, while still creating a significant incentive to come out and fight. As an added benefit, I think it even disincentivises teaming (except for temporary cooperation as demanded by the position on the board). 1. No more points. The winner is the last man standing. 2. No more check and checkmate. You can move your king into check, or leave it in check; you would rarely do so deliberately, but it would be legal, and there would be rare situations where you might want to do so (I'll explain that below). 3. You are not eliminated until your king is captured. 4. And the key change: when you capture someone else's king, you take control of their remaining pieces. If red captures blue's king, on red's next turn, they can move either a red piece or a blue piece, as they are now combined into a single army. However, the pieces should retain their original colour to indicate which direction the pawns can move (but perhaps they should be given hats or something to indicate who now controls them). This creates an incentive for aggressive play: if red loses half his army taking blue out and kills half of blue's army in the process, the combined army will still be very substantial. Additionally, if you take out your neighbour, your strong control over one corner of the board will potentially make it easy for you to promote several pawns in quick succession. This also disincentivises teaming (except on a temporary basis as demanded by the position on the board): if red helps green take blue down, he's just helped green get a powerful army that will soon be used against red. Red might work with green to weaken blue if blue is too powerful, but will be careful about pushing it until blue is eliminated as he doesn't want to strengthen red. A typical game will probably see one player eliminated relatively early, with the other three gradually wearing each other down until you get into a 3-man endgame, and whoever is better positioned in the endgame will win; however, 2- and 3-way draws will not be unheard of. Having your neighbour eliminated will be good for you in the endgame if you have any pawns left on that side of the board, thus increasing the incentive to try to take out one of your neighbours early in the game. Thoughts? P.S. As for the situation where you might deliberately move into check, here are two possible scenarios: 1. Player 2 is in check from Player 3. Player 1 can safely move into check from Player 2, as Player 2 must save his own king. 2. Player 1 deliberately moves into check from Player 3. Player 2 does not want Player 3 to take over all of Player 1's pieces, so he must intervene. The only way he can intervene is to put Player 3 in check, and the only way to put Player 3 in check is to sacrifice his queen for one of the pawns in front of Player 3's king. Thus, Player 1 has put his king in danger to force Player 2 to give up his queen, while opening up Player 3's king in the process. Of course, that could backfire if Player 2 thinks he can take on Player 3 even if he controls Player 1's pieces.

This was a couple days back, so numbers may not be exact. I had one opponent left (green), who was down to a King but led by 10 points. After a hard-fought battle, I could relax and get an easy checkmate. I queened my last pawn, put green into check (mate in 1), then, as planned, green made the only possible move, and then... Boom. Game over. Green was awarded 20 points (and the win). This seems counter-intuitive, to say the least! So far, it's the only rule of 4-player chess that has really thrown me for a loop. It seems to me that the stalemate rules ought to be: * Only stalemate if player cannot move on his/her turn. * Getting stalemated = +20 points for you Even if there's a rationale for the "instant reward for moving into stalemate" when there are 3 or 4 players (which I also don't really understand, to be honest), I feel it's an outright horrible rule once only 2 players remain. TL;DR: 2 queens vs. 1 king should not be this tricky to win!!

Just spectated a game which came down to one king, one pawn and one rook left each, all in the middle of the board. Neither player seemed to know how to finish the game - they spent a while giving rook checks apparently aimlessly, Their chat was disabled already so they couldn't discuss a draw. Eventually one blundered and lost. In their positions I wouldn't have known what conditions would cause a draw to be agreed automatically (repetition? perpetual check? insufficient material?) - are there any rules on the server to tell us? How can you offer a draw with, or without, chat?

Stalemates are considered checkmate in 4 player chess and are therefore non-existent. However, we recently found out that a player that stalemates themself will receive +15 points (e.g. for checkmating themselves). I actually like that as it makes it rewarding to be stalemated (just like in standard Chess). Let me know what you guys think? See the image below:

Okay, so this has come up a bunch of times, let's have a good ole discussion. It seems like a lot of people (me included) agree that to get the 20 points, you should have to actually capture the king, not put it in mate position. There are two options to make this work, game design wise: First off, you only get 20 points when you capture a king, combined with either: 1) No checks, you can still move when in check or even mate 2) If a player is put in mate position, they get force-resigned EDIT: as noted below, for option #2 to work, you probably want to reward any leftover kings on the board to the last player standing. I personally prefer option two, it makes the most sense. If I mate someone, their pieces turn grey, except for the king. I only get the 20 points upon capturing the king. This fixes a whole host of current game problems, where people will get into really complicated mating situations that grind the game to a halt, because they are fighting over who gets the mate. Instead, it should be a royal scramble over who gets the king. Let's discuss at length just this part before we tackle other things like the point system, I think it's a separate issue.

I think there should be different variants for 4 player chess.

just the pawns, curious what that would look like

Currently if a player resigns or flags his king stays on the board as a +20 prize. Other players compete to capture it. My suggestion is: The king (only the king, not the gray army) should be controlled by simple AI. And this AI should move the king in random directions. The moves should be legal (the king should not step under a check) and that king should not capture any alive pieces. This way that king becomes more difficult target. Not just a pile of gold laying on some square. I understand that the developers need to spend some time to make the AI. But this is quite a simple task: 1. Add 8 squares around the king to the list. 2. Remove the squares with any alive pieces from that list. 3. If some squares are attacked by some alive piece of any player - remove them too. 4. If 1 or more squares left in the list then select one of them randomly and move the king to that square. This is the algorithm.

I was spectating a game and these people were acting weird. VincentRoberts: hello? VincentRoberts: HI VincentRoberts: HI eleyo: vincent whats your number? VincentRoberts: what do you mean vahagshabani: he wants to take you out on a date dongtae: ye hes gay for you eleyo: gonna call the cops on you Can you help with people who act like this?

I just had an endgame where I'm closely first (60 for me, 59 for second place, 56 for third place). Second place ended up stalemating third place, and I lost the endgame, making me end up third. I was expecting to end up second place, because I was low on material and there weren't enough pieces for third to overtake me. The stalemate made me come in third place. I don't agree that being stalemated when there are 2 or more players left is a draw. It should be a loss. Of course, my preferred fix for this is that you can't mate people, only king capture (with players being force-resigned if they can't legally move anymore), as noted in other topics.

It would be a real nice feature to allow opponents to contact after each game, as well a history of the games, if ever someone desires to share how they enjoyed that game instead of not recalling what their username was fully since you only get one lousy minute of optioned time before your history yourself. lol Sometimes I will hit on their avatar to pop another screen but, again, with only 1 measly minute ( massive hint ) it can start chewing the time, especially if you wish each of the 3. Please take into consideration?

I've had two games now where I resigned when there were two players left (for score purposes) and I didn't get a rating increase. Could this be a bug or is there a new rule I don't know of?

1. Bug: Currently if you type some text in chat and use the "left arrow" key (keyboard) to move the cursor back it affects the board rewinding the moves. So, the focus is not in the chat window, but on the board. Please fix it. 2. Suggestion: I recall that in Team Mode you need to type /team before messages. This is very inconvenient. I suggest to make 2 separate chat windows instead. The top one for the team chat and another at the bottom for the general chat.