Some of these have been suggested before: we'll have to wait for them to come in a future update. Really cool ideas though!
About the duck chess suggestion, you can already do that! You just have to make a custom position with the number of ducks you want, and players can move one of the ducks (not all of them, sadly) wherever they want (in compliance with duck chess rules).
I've been doing some NCVs lately as it's something I just enjoy doing. And now, after I've got used to the all of the menus that allows us to customize the rules and positions, I would love to share some of the suggestions that I have to improve it even if just a little bit.
First, I would like to suggest adding an option wich allows to select pieces from the board that will be shuffled to create different starting positions, as in paradigm or 960 chess. I can see it working similar to how we select the real pieces or the KotH zone.
Second thing would be to add options for customizing the duck, such as the number of them in a game, which player(s) will be able to control it, or turn interval to move it.
My third suggestion is to fix the cost of all 29 game pieces. The new setup chess mode allows us to modify the bank of pieces that we can place on the board with our points, but the cost of most of the pieces is very disproportionate.
My last suggestion is the one I like the most. A new way to customize promotion.
Currently, we can select which pieces we want our pawns to promote to on the "edit rules" button.
While in "edit position" we can change the rank in which the pawns promote and their initial rank.
I propose to create a new way to edit these rules and wich can give us more options to create NCVs.
First we would click on a "promotion" button. With this, we will not only be able to modify the way promotion works in your variant, but you will also be able to create multiple types of
promotion for the same game. (I would suggest the number of different promotions to be unlimited).
Each promotion we customize should consist of three parts that should be selected:
1.- Piece that promotes (currently they can only be pawns. The idea here is now you can select not only pawns but any piece there is in the game.
2.- promotion rank. Here we select the squares or rank in which the selected piece will be promoting.
3.- Promote to. Finally, we select in which pieces we want the selected piece to promote to.
Understood this way, the classic idea of coronation is: Pawn, 8th, QRNB.
With this change, we could add as an idea within a variant that, for example, if a horse reaches the eighth rank it can promote to an archbishop or a chancellor: Knight, 8th, HE
Here some idea of how it could look like.
I truly think that adding unlimited promotion rules for a single game, is giving NCVs creators a lot of room for creativity.
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