When you click on the ? to play Minihouse it shows you how to play but there is a mistake where it says pawns pawns promote on the 7th rank but they promote on the 6th rank because the board is 6x6.
It's an 8x8 with a ring around it. If you turn on coordinates, you see that the board goes from 2 to 7 rather than the expected 1 to 6.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone who isn't an expert on how promotion works, which I think is bad.
Anyway, the way it works is that in variants, all boards are either 14x14 or 8x8. Minihouse is on an 8x8 board, with a ring of blank squares around it. This means that the coordinates are 2-7 and b-g.
it is confusing. i wish it would change
Yeah, unfortunately this is a limitation of chess.com's variant editor. The way Minihouse is currently is definitely better than the "6x6" board option where coordinates would've been 5-10 and e-j, and it would've said they promote on the 10th rank.
Perhaps it would make more sense to say "promote on the last rank" or something, but that would require a little custom programming on chess.com's part, as the rules currently are automatically generated.
That said, I definitely am a big fan of the coordinates being b-g, 2-7, as those are probably the squares you would use if you wanted to play this over the board with a regular chess set.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to anyone who isn't an expert on how promotion works, which I think is bad.
Anyway, the way it works is that in variants, all boards are either 14x14 or 8x8. Minihouse is on an 8x8 board, with a ring of blank squares around it. This means that the coordinates are 2-7 and b-g.
it is confusing. i wish it would change
Me too.
I don't care if the rules say promotion on the 7th or 10th rank if I cannot tap the correct tiny square on my phone or flip the board to see it from another colour perspective.
So far, I haven't seen a serious argument for not changing it to dim 6x6.
We currently don’t have a mechanism for transferring composite sub-ratings to dedicated ratings; changing the dimensions to 6x6 also makes the server register the variant as separate and would in practice just reset all ratings. So yes, this is on us, but devs will be trying to figure this out especially since Minihouse is now a Featured variant.
Might I also ask what phone you are using? On mine it’s not terribly small and I think it’s generally implied that back rank is promotion. I could add a small clarification in the game chat description sometime today if it would help to clarify things for new users.
When you click on the ? to play Minihouse it shows you how to play but there is a mistake where it says pawns pawns promote on the 7th rank but they promote on the 6th rank because the board is 6x6.