Taking king while in checkmate

Hello,

In this game:

Why is red is allowed to take blue's king while him being checkmated?

From the rules:

• Checkmate only happens when the checkmated player's turn is reached.
• The first team to checkmate an enemy player wins!

Edit game link: #50661152.

Game Link

It’s allowed because king capture takes priority over checkmate in Teams. You can understand why using simple logic:

1. Checkmate is threatening to take the king on the next move with no defense
2. Taking the king is immediately killing the royal, meaning that it is more important.

Man, that’s a crazy situation. Never seen that before. This is the kind of thing that makes me love Teams 4PC 😆

Its Kind of like how in atomic if you are in check or checkmate, but you can still capture a piece next to the king

fun piece of trivia: this wasn't always the case. there are still old games in the archive (like this) from before the rules got changed where checkmates had priority over king captures. but i would agree with the point GS made that king captures should have priority over checkmates.

Oh, how weird.

Thanks for the explanations. Maybe the rules should be enhanced for more clarity, for example explicitly talk about the possibility of king capture and king capture priority over checkmate cases, because strictly based on the written rules (containing no information on king capture): "Checkmate only happens when the checkmated player's turn is reached" a new 4PC player would assume checkmate priority over king capture like in the game Mattin sent.

To summarize,

Illustration of king capture over checkmate rule FFA vs Teams:

• FFA one check scenario: results in king capture over checkmate rule (despite being checkmated, red can cancel blue's check by eating his king, which eliminates blue from the game and his check)

• Teams one check scenario: results in king capture over checkmate rule (despite being checkmated, red can eat blue's king and defeat one of the attackers before blue eats his king, in teams only need to defeat one player of the opponent team to win)

FFA and Teams have the same behavior in this scenario.

• FFA two checks scenario: results in checkmate (taking blue's king is impossible as red has to escape both checks, in FFA defeating one attacker is not sufficient)

• Teams two checks scenario: results in king capture over checkmate rule (despite being checkmated, red can eat blue's king and defeat one of the attackers before they can eat his king, in teams only need to defeat one player of the opponent team to win)

In the second scenario, king capture over checkmate rule only applies to Teams.

Another game with the same situation