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Note: Currently you can only join the tournament and we will wait to start playing until v2 is released. Here it is the Economy Chess Ladder Tournament! Basically this is a never-ending tournament where the goal is to get to the top of the ladder by winning against someone higher up in the ladder. Please note that the rules are subject to change. Rules: 1. To join post a comment in this forum 2. Everyone starts at the bottom of the ladder. 3. How to advance in the ladder 3.1 You may play against someone up to 4 positions above or below you. 3.2 Make sure both players understand it is a ladder game. 3.3 The games must be Economy Chess games, the rules for the game is up for the players agreement, but no handicap or engines allowed. Also, if both players agrees it can be a match with more than 1 game (like 2 or 3 for example). 3.4 If the higher player wins both players keep their positions 3.5 If the lower player wins then the players swap positions. 3.6 If it is a draw both players keep their positions. 4. When a match is finished. Post the results here, even if the positions ends up the same we want to see that there was activity here. If it was an interesting game, you may post it in the game archive forum. 5. If someone becomes inactive for a long time they might get removed from the ladder, but is free to join again and will start from the bottom like everyone else. 6. If you want to quit the ladder just post a comment in this forum saying you want to quit. 7. Remember the most important thing is to enjoy playing this chess variant and even if someone is outside of your range you may still play non-ladder games.

Playing Economy Chess on the board just got 86%* easier! Ted Elrick, aka Snappleman on Boardgamegeek.com, wrote an awesome application that keeps track of basicly everything that happens in Economy Chess. All you have to do is tell the software what you just did on the chessboard. + a chessclock with increment + the application works on any browser and also works on smartphones+ internetconnection is needed to open the page, after that no connection is needed to use the application+ resize the scoreboard to your own will (ctrl + mousescroll)+ all variants of the v2 software can be chosen At this time only the standard Economy Chess variant can be played. Other options will soon be implemented. Big thanks again to Ted for making this application, it runs great! The scoreboard application can be used here: http://c3g.no-ip.org/EcoChess * proven in several clinical studies

1. Play Economy Chess using the software Download the currently available software (v1). This is the first version of the software. Version 2 is currently being built. See below for details on how to play other people using the software. 2. Play Economy Chess on the board There are two ways to play the game on the board: 1) use the online timer application - works in any browser and on any smartphone- requires internetconnection to open the page. After opening the application works without being connected to the internet. - you also need a chessboard + 2 sets of pieces and a tokens (can be printed or use tokens from other games) 2) Use the print and playTo play Economy Chess in real life you'll have to take a couple actions:- download the Print and Play documents and print them out- get a chessboard + 2 sets of piecesSet up the pieces normally and place a marker of your color next to every piece. Use the scoresheet to keep track of the economy. It does take some time to note down. 3. Join the ladder (ongoing tournament) to test your skills When the next version of the game is released, a ladder will start. Its a tournament where you can join and leave any time. Try to climb the ladder by defeating others. Players of various ratings have signed up! Please note:Economy Chess v2 is an offline desktop game. You can play Economy Chess against others in several ways:- With a friend sitting behind the same computer (local game)- Correspondence Chess: email or message your opponent a move. You can save and load your active games.- Play a 'live' game. Go to a chatroom or use a messenger (e.g.: facebook messenger or this group's chatroom) to communicate real time. You'll have to send each move manually. * Unfortunatly you can not: - play on a live server, like here on chess.com- play against a computer AI Printable tokens:

***** Rules index ***** 1. Quick introduction2. What's different?3. Owning a square4. Conquering a square5. Gaining income6. Buying new pieces 7. Gamerules video (4:00)8. Settings (chess960) 1. Quick introduction Welcome to Economy Chess: a chessvariant in which you conquer the squares of the board. These squares generate income (coins) which can be used to place new pieces on the player's backrank. Spend -or save- your money wisely and try to check-mate your opponent! 2. What's different? Economy Chess is alot like normal chess, pieces move the same and the objective is the same (checkmate the king). The difference is the economy: when your pieces move they conquer squares. Each square = 1 coin income per turn. Use the coins to purchase pieces, and place them in your productionarea. 3. Owning a square A player owns a square when: - he has a piece standing on it- he was the last player who had a piece on it A square is neutral when no player ever stood on it. 4. Conquering a square A player can conquer a neutral or enemy controlled square by:- Moving a piece onto a vacant square- Capturing an enemy piece A piece only conquers the square that it ends up on. 5. Gaining Income By moving your pieces around you will conquer more and more squares. At the end of your turn, each owned square will harvest you 1 coin income. However, each piece also costs 1 coin upkeep per turn. therefore you calculate your income by deducting the upkeep from the harvest: #of squares owned - #of pieces owned = incomeAt the end of the player's turn the Income is added to your Savings. After several turns players have saved enough coins to buy new pieces. 6. Buying new pieces When you have got enough coins you can buy one or more new pieces. The sum for the piece(s) is deducted from your savings. Players are not allowed to buy when they are under check. Furthermore, if you buy pieces, you may not move that turn. You do harvest income like every other turn.Default prices (coins):Pawn: 25 Knight: 75Bisshop: 78Rook: 125Queen: 225 Some restrictions apply to the placement of new piece(s):- white player can only place pieces on rank 1 and pawns on rank 2- black player can only place pieces on rank 8 and pawns on rank 7- a square must be empty- the square may not be enemy controlled 7. Gamerules (3min) + v1 software explanation 8. Settings (chess960) Various parts of the game and mechanics can be controlled using different settings. The default settings are the recommended settings. Check the Economy Chess960 box to play 960!

When I joined this group I was thinking a bit on the rules of economy chess and if things could be changed in order to make things interesting. I ended up with 2 ideas of Economy Chess variants that might be fun to be able to trigger on or off before starting the game. I call those variants "Treasure Hunt" and "banks". Here's how I thought they could work. Treasure Hunt In the treasure hunt variant there will sometimes appear a treasure chest on a random unoccupied square. The first player who lands a piece on that square will get some cash and the chest will then disappear. Some more specifics: The appearances of treasure chests will happen every 5th move. Or to be more precise after whites 5th move, blacks 10th move, whites 15th move, blacks 20th move etc. The square will not be completely random. If there still is squares on the board that neither player controls it will be a random square among those squares only. If no such squares exist then it will be random among all squares unoccupied by pieces. The amount of cash there is in a chest will increase for each chest that appears. The first will have 5, the second 10, the third 15, the fourth 20 and so on. For those that likes configurable options you could be able to change how often the the treasure chests appear (5 default) and how much the first treasure chest will be worth (5 default). Note that this standard setting will make a chest worth the same as the number of moves played when the chest appear. Another option would be to be able to manually put the treasure on the board instead of making it random, but this option is only recommended to use for one player when 2 players are playing through chat in order to put the treasure chest on the same square. Banks In the banks variant you will be able to buy banks at the same time you purchase pieces. You can put the bank on any square you control and will be given three extra income for each bank. Be careful though, because if any piece lands on the same square as the bank (regardless of color) the bank will disappear. The bank won't make any difference regarding piece movement on the board (pieces can walk over it). I was thinking the banks should be relatively cheap and cost about 20. This means you would need 7 turns in order for your bank to make profit. Configurable options are how much income you get in each bank and how much the bank cost. Of course the final balancing should be based on experience and I'm just guessing with some numbers I think makes sense. I had to chose some numbers to illustrate the idea. Also these variants will not appear in Economy Chess 2.0

If you had fun game that others should replay, post the pgn here. Use the "export moves" button ingame to export the moves.Please also post what prizes, quantity and settings where used. The Economy Chess uses slightly different notation: castling is recorded as a King`s move, i.e. White`s 0-0 is written as Kg1 the $ sign means a new piece was bought and placed, i.e. 27. $Qd1 $f2 means that White got two new pieces a queen on d1 and a pawn on f2. In 1 move, it is possible to buy and place as many pieces as a player can afford. when a pawn captures it is recorded as e.g. xd4 although the standard notation would be either exd4 or cxd4

I'll make some videos of games that have been played. This was the first game between me and Boletus_CZ Next Friday we play another game and I will be backed by Houdini 1.5 (muhaha!) This will probably be a whole lot more interesting game :)

From the chess.com downloads a set of documents is available that can be used to play Economy Chess on the board. Print the documents, get a board and pieces and you can play a game! The .zip file contains: - standard rules (.doc -4 pages-) with image examples and optional rules- a scoresheet (.doc -1 page- or .pgn) to keep track of the economy. the sheet has most important rules listed in a brief summary- red and blue tokens (.pgn) that can be printed and cut out Also required:1 chessboard2 sets of piecesoptional: a printed version of the rules optional: use personal (heavyweight) tokens that dont get pushed around when moving pieces. About noting down the score: *edit* after Martin0's excellent commentA better way to keep track of income is to only place markers on squares that you own, but no piece is standing on. Because that amount of markers equals your income. Do not forget to place a marker on a square when you move your piece of it.Scoresheet and Markers Rightclick on the images and save them to your computer. You can now print them. In a local handcraft store I bought a couple mosaic colours for about $2/set. They work fine.

The beta version of Economy Chess v2 is out! We need people to help Monkeytesting! The final bugreport will be sent to the programmer at the end of December. People can still help testing, send me a message! How to open the game, sent by email? The first thing you have to do is to rename the downloaded file. If you have Windows: right click -> rename -> change the file extension from .zip_rename to .zip -> confirm (the system will ask whether you really want to do it) -> extract Things that need testing: - Play around with the UNDO button.Try to write down which moves you make in the bugreport. When do you get an error message? - Does the NOTATION work properly?There are some exceptional situations in chess that require special notation: castling, multiple piece capture. Is the notation displayed correct? When you export the moves does it show notation correct? - Saving and Loading seems buggy.Try to save various positions in various ways: does it save promoted pawns? castling on/off? Does it save income etc correctly? - Play around in the Chess960 using various settingsDo you get errors? Are things not working? Always note down in a document which steps you made. Also try to give as much possible information about the bug. We have to reproduce the bug to be able to fix it. Make screenshots (ctrl-print scrn and then ctrl-v in a document) to show us what you see Thanks alot everyone already!!

Want to play a game against a live person? Post a message here :)

Thought it might be good to answer some questions about the upcoming launch of version 2 and Economy Chess in general.When will version 2 be available?The current date is the 1st of January. It could be a little earlier or a little later. It needs some good testing and chances are that some (programming) problems occur. I will post an update when I know the date more precisely. When will the ladder (ongoing tournament) start? When version 2 is launched the ladder will start. You can join in anytime though, also when it has already started! The goal is to climb the ladder and get as high as possible. I don't want to wait, I want to play now. How?You can play with version 1. It's available from the chess.com download section: Economy Chess v1. You can challenge others on the forum. Please do read the "known bugs" thread so you dont get any unpleasant suprises. The software works pretty good, but it has a couple major issues (though not 'gamestoppers')You can use the print and play from the chess.com downloads. Print out the rules, scoresheet and tokens and play the game against someone OTB. How will we play games against eachother when v2 is launched?Unfortunatly the software will run locally on your computer. It will not send moves to your opponent. You will have to send you moves manually using e-mail, personal message or an online chatbox (e.g.: the chat of the Economy Chess group.)Perhaps in a future version there will be a computer to play against or something that sends the moves automatically, but that is programming on another level and requires much more upkeep than this standalone software. Why did you make software for the variant? Because the variant is very hard to play OTB! The simple idea of "conquer a square when you move onto it" popped into my mind and I loved it so much that I wanted to play it. OTB this was tough because we had to keep track of who owned the squares and count up every turn. Who is the programmer?Not me :) Economy Chess has been built by Ancosys from Pakistan. If you need any kind of software I recommed him and his team alot! He communicates well and is really good at what he does. See his profile and projects that he has been working on here.I see you are posting messages in groups that are not about Economy Chess, why?Because I hope many people will try the game and join the ladder. Before posting those messages I contacted a superadmin and explained that I joined to post the message and asked if they are ok with that. Only after explicit permission I posted the message. Sorry for the inconvenience when you see the message more than once. So you want to make lots of money with this game, no?Ofcourse it would be great if someone came up to me and offered me a million $. But that is not going to happen. I created this game because I loved the idea. And actually I've spent quite a bit myself to get it where it is today. I don't expect to make any profit. The game is free to download, no hidden costs, no adds.. The goal is that people enjoy this variant. What does chess.com think about this? Is it legal?I have not spoken directly about this, but in a chat an admin thanked me for adding content to the site. Also in a personal message I asked a well know admin if I can post in her group and she said it was fine. So they know about the game and didn't close the group or took the game from their downloads. Since the game is free I don't think much legal issues arise. As for me: I think chess.com is a great website that offers alot of free chesstools. I hope they see the game as something that adds to their site. How can I help to make Economy Chess a better game?1) Spread the word! Like the facebookpage or tell others about the game and this group. You can also use the social mediabuttons above forumthreads. It would be great if you tweet the rules for instance.2) If you enjoyed the game and feel like helping out you can make a donation using paypal (elkitchgames@gmail.com). If you can't spare anything, no worries! Just have fun and play it for free. If you make a donation I will mention you as a contributor in future versions.3) Once Economy Chess v2 is launched I will post a thread for bugs, glitches and your thoughts on improvement. Me and others will test it as much as we can but chances are that we will miss something. And perhaps you got a good idea that should really be added in version 3.4) Do you know someone who is good at (AI)programming and making apps? In the 3rd version adding a computer to play against would be great. This seems to be very complicated, so any help (coding or knowledge) is much appreciated.Also I will post a guide to play Economy Chess OTB. This is possible but especially the scorekeeping takes alot of time and errors are made easily. An app that keeps track of income, savings etc would help alot. It would not display the board, but just add up and deduct after the players input what they just did OTB.