Chess Variant Creator, if you have questions.

I wanted to invent a variant called SMESS for people who like freedom and not worrying about their King all the time. It is exactly the same as chess except the King is a normal piece, there is no such thing as check and the King can be taken like any other piece, pawns still queen; to win just be the last guy with a piece on the board.

I made a very similar variant a long time ago except that I decided if your king died you just elect a new king. So you swap any of your existing pieces on the board for a king.

The winner again was the whoever was the only one left with material on the board. You can still have drawn games, e.g. if both sides have just a king left or not enough material to force the player to lose his king. (There is however no such thing as stalemate, it would be a win for the player whose opponent was forced to put their king en-prise).

One can, of course, capture a defended queen with their king then if the king is recaptured, swap it for one of their pawns.

(In an endgame you might want to swap a minor piece for the king to enable a pawn to get promoted to a queen).

 

HGMuller thank you for make many variants of chess. Can you make Makruk variants rules is correctly because endgame of Makruk it different rules. I mean from Sakkadan to Sakmak And can you make promotions of makruk from Pawn to Biangai not Med. I mean pictures should change to another pictures. Because the rules of Makruk only have only one Med each side.But you can have many Biangai it move like Med but different kind of pictures. Thank you so much. Look forwards to see you answers my post.

I heard, due to budget constraints,  FIDE is only going with 10% of the Chess960 positions.  So it will be known as Chess96 soon.

Can you make this variant or play me in it?

I made a variant that I think might already exist. The pieces move like this:

Soldier: Takes the place of the pawn. Moves and captures one square forward or like a pawn.

Long knight: Takes the place of the knight. Moves or captures three squares forward and one to the side and can jump over pieces.

Archer: Takes the place of the Bishop. Moves one square forward, to the side, or backwards or one or two diagonally. Captures by shooting arrows three or more squares diagonally. (Shooting means it captures that piece, but does not occupy the captured piece’s square)

Tank: Takes the place of the rook. Moves one square diagonally or two to the side, forward or backwards. Captures by shooting three or more squares to the side, forward or backwards.

Wizard: Takes the place of the queen. Moves by teleporting to any unoccupied square on the board. Only captures like a queen.

King: If you’re on chess.com you probably know what a king is.

 

Thanks for your helpful feedback, neoliminal! I have a 12 move game I played against someone in real life, and it was a wizard mate against me. The wizard is OP, I know.

The Long Knight has a mate in two: 1. Lc4 Lc5 2.Lxb7

The wizards are worth 12 points, compared to the queen(9 points). The soldiers are worth 1.5 points and long knights 2. Archers are worth 3.5 points and tanks 5.5. If you have any objections to the point system, tell me.

Using a method I created to benchmark piece values, I suspect the Wizard is worth around 30 points. It's an extremely dangerous and valuable piece.

That doesn't sound right. The teleport move is similar to a piece drop in Crazyhouse. And although pieces in hand there are worth more than on the board, the difference is not nearly that large.

Consider the end-game King + Wizard + 3 Pawns vs King + 3 Queens + 3 Pawns, with the Kings nicely tucked away behind a Pawn shield. (As they would tend to be when there still is that much powerful material on the board.) I think the player with the Wizard would be toast there. It would struggle even against 2 Queens, as one of the Queens could be kept on the back rank to prevent mates, but still attack the opponen's King fortress from there.

I did think about the idea of dropping in Crazyhouse, but dropping a piece is a one time move. You do get an immediate benefit, but after that the piece is in the (potentially) most advantageous position it can't gain any more value as a piece. It's the best possible version of that piece for one move.

The Wizard has the opportunity to be the best possible version of itself on every move. For example it is theoretically really, really hard to have your Wizard trapped. Imagine if you had a Queen in hand in Crazyhouse on every turn.

As I said at first, I highly suspect the Wizard has a number of forced mates as white, meaning the number of possible openings might be one.

It is true that repetitive use of the teleport move gives an advantage over a one-time drop. OTOH, pieces tend to live very short in Crazyhouse, and the advantage of having them in hand is in the range of positional moves. Even multiplying that by the expected lifetime wouldn't get you anywhere near 30.

But I think the most important point is whether the Wizard would be able to beat a pair of Queens. If it is really worth 30, it should be able to do that easily. But I think it is just the other way around: the pair of Queens would win hands down.

There are innumerable positions where having a Wizard would create a checkmate, where having two Queens would be meaningless. The possibility to jump to any square is a power that really can't be duplicated by other pieces. Perhaps the Amazon (Queen/Knight) would start to get there.

Beyond attacking, the Wizard is an amazing defender, able to watch over multiple other pieces from ideal squares.

It's inappropriate to assume a pieces value in a vacuum (with is one of the advantages of the system I created), but it would always required playtesting to get an accurate valuation.

I still assert that in the variant, as describes, the Wizard becomes the most important piece to the exclusion of other strategies. The loss of a Wizard would likely be the loss of the game in a way that losing a Queen doesn't even come close.

That is also true for a Rook, if the enemy King is on the back rank behind three Pawns. Doesn't mean a Rook is worth more than two Queens, though. The point is the Kings start safe, and that as long as the opponent still has a Wizard you will make very sure it stays safely hidden behind a wall of pieces. Any mates would be like fool's mates, where you voluntarily open a file, rank or diagonal to your King through which it could be checked. Which would be a horific blunder in this game.

I think I remember the "system you created". Wasn't this calculating the average mobilities in a position at the end of a popular opening line? I admit there is some logic to that, and in fact I use a somewhat similar idea in the AI for the Interactive Diagram to estimate piece values. There I just set up random positions with a certain piece density (where the black/white ratio increases with increasing rank number), and count the average number of moves and captures of the piece on all the empty squares.

But in fact piece values are very much dominated by their value in the end-game, i.e. on a near-empty board. A Rook isn't all that useful in the early middle game, but changing it for a minor in that game stage still puts you at a nearly losing disadvantage. So the piece density I use isn't too high.

In the described variant you should not underestimate the value of the Archer and Tank. Rifle captures are very nasty. The wizard might 'watch over' other pieces as much as it likes, but that would prevent the rifle captures from just annihilating them with impunity. I certainly agree that the Wizard is the strongest piece in that variant, but this might already have been true if it was a normal Queen. It doesn't need to have a value 30 for that.

I think I remember the "system you created". Wasn't this calculating the average mobilities in a position at the end of a popular opening line?

You have a good memory, yes. It's a opening and the value is created from placing the piece in every square and then calculating the value of piece it can capture and protect. Extra points for a  King capture.

Out of curiosity, what value would you give a Wizard?

 

Hard to say. The strongest piece I ever tested was the Amazon (QN compound). Its value in a FIDE context was exactly equal to that of a Queen and a Knight. This suggested that when a piece gets too strong, there is no extra synergy value.

Correct me if I am wrong, but King + Wizard vs King + Queen would be a draw, right? The Wizard cannot attack the Queen without being captured by it, and a Wizard alone (like a Queen alone) cannot checkmate a King. So all you have to do to defend is cut of the enemy King from your own with the Queen, and you are safe. That is much easier than defending against an Amazon. The latter can very easily checkmate a King all by itself, and it can attack the Queen with its Knight move.

The ability to jump loses its value when the board gets empty, and distant Queen moves do not have to be discounted compared to direct jumps. A Queen can have 27 moves, and the Wizard always has 63. But all the extra moves are non-captures, and those are typically worth only half as much as captures, i.e. 1/3 of an all-purpose move. So the extra 36 non-captures could count only as 12. That suggests that the end-game value of the Wizard could be as low as Queen + Rook.

 

It's trivial for the White Wizard to move to a skewer square from anywhere on the board. I'm not certain this can be forced, but it would create a situation where even with a few pawns per side the Wizard player would have a huge advantage.

The Wizard is also untrappable, unlike the Queen.

I'm going to play around with openings a bit and see what I can come up with.

what if instead of moving anywhere the wizard could "smite" any pawn or lower level piece in a five by five square radius, while moving like a king? (btw don't take anything I say too seriously I'm not that good at chess, I just thought it would be fun like that).

A lone Queen cannot force a King away from an edge. That is, if the King is on second rank, there is no way a Queen could attack all 6 squares in the King neighborhood on 1st or 2nd rank. So the King can always make a move that either returns it to the 1st rank, of keeps it on the 2nd. It never can be forced away from the edge far enough to allow a skewer.