This is truly amazing. I would love to have this in chess.
Portal Chess
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Just so you know this "knight-like move" is called a camel move
Also can you go through any portal when entering one?
" Kirbyrayquaza escreveu: Also can you go through any portal when entering one?
Do you mean, does a portal work in both directions? The answer to that is yes.
I think you mean: can you exit from any portal endpoint on the board, once you've entered a portal? The answer is no. A portal is a two-way wormhole with two endpoints. If a wormhole exists between squares a1 and c4, you can enter at a1 and exit at c4, or you can enter at c4 and exit at a1, and that's it. It doesn't matter if there's also a wormhole between a2 and c5, you can't enter at a1 and exit at c2 or c5. The two wormholes are entirely separate from each other. Inside a wormhole you can't "see" any endpoints except the opposite endpoint of the wormhole that you're in.
(But, it's possible to set things up so that there's a wormhole connecting a1 to c4, and another wormhole connecting C4 to a3. In that case you can step in at a1 and step out at a3 or vice versa. Also, if you have a gliding piece like a rook, it's possible to glide onto one endpoint, come out the other end of that wormhole, keep gliding onto a third endpoint, go through a second wormhole, and keep on gliding, all in one move. Wormhole travel is instantaneous and uses no tempo.)
How do you tell which wormhole connects to which
(I accidentally quoted my own post #5 instead of editing it. I've edited it in the right place now, although I can't seem to format the embedded quote correctly.)
Kirbyrayquaza escreveu:
How do you tell which wormhole connects to which
You mark the endpoints on the board with coins or checkers or go stones or pieces of paper. Use markers that make obvious pairs, and that also let you remember which queen created the portal. I use two US nickels for the portal created by the white queen, and two pennies for the portal created by the black queen.
My son came up with this variant. Possibly it's been done before but I think it's interesting enough to share.
All rules as per standard chess, but with the following additions.
1) Queens have a new ability: a move that is similar to a knight's move (including the ability to jump over other pieces). Compared to a knight's move, it is elongated: where a knight moves up-two-and-over-one, the new queen move is up-three-and-over-one.
2) Whenever the queen uses the new move, it creates a Portal, which we'll call a wormhole, between its starting square and its landing square. (We put markers, such as coins, on the board to indicate the presence of the wormhole's endpoints, which we'll call "openings". One coin at the square the queen just left, and one coin underneath the queen.)
2 and a half) The queen is not allowed to capture or give check using its knight-like move.
A wormhole allows for instant teleportation in either direction. A bishop, rook, or queen gliding over an opening (or a pawn making its two-square first move) may choose to go through the wormhole and continue gliding (in the original direction) in a single move. It may also choose to stop on either endpoint (opening) of the wormhole. A pawn or piece landing on an opening (including a pawn making a diagonal capture) may choose to stop on either endpoint of the wormhole. A piece standing on one opening of a wormhole may start its move from the other opening of the wormhole.
Teleporting through a wormhole is always optional. An opening "in the way" does not necessarily prevent, say, a rook from gliding across the board.
Knights ignore openings when jumping over them. When landing exactly on an opening, knights may travel through the wormhole like any other piece. Both those things are also true of a queen performing its knight-live move.
The two openings of a wormhole become, for nearly all practical purposes, the same square. To threaten one is to threaten the other. To occupy one is to occupy the other. But wormholes are not permanent (see rule 3 below), so a piece moving onto one opening of a wormhole should always consider whether or not it wants to pass through the wormhole immediately.
It is legal to pass through more than one wormhole in a single move.
It is legal to place an opening on a square that already has an opening.
It is legal to create a wormhole with one opening on a square that will later be crossed or landed on by both the king and the rook during castling. So castling makes it possible for two pieces to travel through the wormhole in one move, though I don't think it's ever a useful tactic.
3) Whenever a queen uses its wormhole-creating ability, any wormhole previously created by that queen vanishes.
Therefore there are usually no more than two wormholes on the board at a given time: one created by the white queen, and one created by the black queen. It's convenient to use a pair of copper coins for the openings of the wormhole created by the black queen, and a pair of nickel-plated coins for the openings of the wormhole created by the white queen.
It is possible, after queening pawns, to end up with extra queens on the board, and therefore you could have more than two simultaneous wormholes. But this should make no practical difference to the course of a game, as a side with two queens is usually just a few moves from winning and has no need for wormholes.
I haven't played enough to be confident in whether I'd like to tweak the rules some more, but as this post is already getting long, I'll save possible changes for later. Instead I'll talk briefly about how these rules affect gameplay.
Wormholes are tremendous fun, especially for beginners, because of their potential for causing tactical chaos. For advanced players, I think wormhole creation will be rare, though the threat of creating one does have interesting implications for things like long pawn chains and closed positions.
Creating a wormhole:
1) is risky
2) takes significant tempo
To create a useful wormhole, you have to:
-move your queen to where you want one opening to be (is it a safe square?)
-do the special move , so your queen ends up on the other end (is that a safe square?)
-move your queen off the opening so other pieces can come through the wormhole (tempo!)
Notice that at the end of the second step, the queen is twice as vulnerable as usual, because an opponent can attack the queen by attacking either its current position, or its former position (the other opening of the new wormhole).
Edit: I realized people were confused by the word "portal", which could refer to an endpoint (a.k.a. gate) of the teleportation-tunnel, or could refer to the whole teleportation-tunnel (a pair of endpoints and a connection between them. I've edited to use "opening" for an endpoint, and "wormhole" for the whole pair-of-openings-and-tunnel-between-them.