Very nice.
Both castling and en passant can be allowed if you'd ask me.
Question: If you have one stone left and no King on the board, would that make that last stone royal? With check / mate / stalemate?
Critique this variant: Manifest Chesstiny
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Nov 26, 2017
0
#5
My very first attempt from years ago was an empty 9x9 board with a random game queue.
I will not bore you with the details but basically it was years of trying everything and thousands and thousands of lines of code.
Advice is usually only taken in hindsight and hindsight is of course a perfect science.
My simple advice is this: Give up man, I have been through all of that, you do not want to go there.
And here is the real killer, it took me years to figure this one out.
Chess players want to play theory, how else are they going to play like the grandmasters?
Look at Fischer Random Chess, aka Chess960, more than 20 years after Bobby invented it very few people actually play it. I personally know a grandmaster and he will not touch it.
In my opinion, and this is just my opinion, people that play obscure chess variants with unusual rules are generally very weak chess players.
They would rather be a big fish in a tiny pond than be a tiny fish in a huge pond, in my opinion that is their primary motivation in playing unusual games.
This basically means that the target market for any unusual games that are created will always be very small perhaps even insignificant.
game_designer wrote:
In my opinion, and this is just my opinion, people that play obscure chess variants with unusual rules are generally very weak chess players.
There are many strong players that like chess variants. This includes some of the very best chess players. Not sure what you would count as obscure, but I bet the bughouse chess rules would sound very strange the first time you heard of it. To me now though the bughouse rules feel normal. Once you get familiar with a ruleset it does not feel obscure anymore.
I don't think doubled pawns or double attacks are really a problem. In the first diagram posted by @game_designer white simply hang his queen since black can capture it with for example B@h7xd4.
I think this is certainly playable, but it is hard to make progress without allowing tactics by a piece suddenly appearing. Everything is protected, so there is no weaknesses to play for and if you make a move that makes a piece that is not a pawn appear you lose a lot of flexibility. I'd be hesitant to judge the variant before trying it, but I would try with the pawns on the second and seventh rank already on the board and just 8 stones for each player. That would also mean pawns can not appear on the first rank which feels a bit weird.
@game_designer - I don't see the problems you're getting at in your diagrams. Can you elaborate?
To be clear, this is just for my edification, not because I want to convince anyone to play it. I just want to see if I can make something that satisfies my own standards of "good". To borrow an analogy from music, it's the equivalent of "doing my scales".
@Martin0
You say:
"Everything is protected, so there is no weaknesses to play for and if you make a move that makes a piece that is not a pawn appear you lose a lot of flexibility."
What you say seems true to me. Are you saying then, players will establish a pawn structure before ever bringing the main pieces on board? And if so, is this a bad thing?
Nov 27, 2017
0
#12
Can you have Pawns on the 2nd or 7th rank?
I mean, for example, White starts with spawning Pawn to c2, takes the stone, then has to move the Pawn on c2 to either c3 or c4 during that same move.
Kinda strange affect on Pawn structure if that is the case.
Indeed that is possible, and it is strange in the sense that it isn't Chess. But does it lead to a bad game in its own right? That's what I'm trying to figure out.
Nov 27, 2017
0
#14
@NickyBentley
Pawns are going to be the big headache for you.
I learned the hard way, the reality is that you need to have rules that ensure that the Pawns are spread across the board when spawning.
Otherwise you end up with clusters of Pawns that contain doubled Pawns, lots of open files for the Rooks and repeated Pawn breaks.
For example:
White spawns @e2 then moves to e4
Then later he does @e1 - e2 so he has doubled Pawns on the E File.
Then later he plays say e4xd5 for the first Pawn he dropped on the E File.
Then later he plays say e2-e4 for the second Pawn he dropped on the E File.
So he can actually Pawn break twice on one file and that is a problem.
In my old game I had a rule that a player can not create doubled Pawns when spawning, meaning that if he already had a Pawn on a file then he could not spawn another Pawn to that same file.
This ensures that the Pawns get spread across the board but it does not stop Pawn breaks occurring more than once for any particular file.
Nov 27, 2017
0
#15
I probably should mention that for my old game, the 9x9 board that was empty at the start of the game.
I actually worked with a grandmaster on that one, I would meet him once a week for a total period of 3 months.
I would do whatever during the week then go meet him and play test it all evening, for the changes that I made that week.
So I did a lot of testing with a grandmaster man.
Can you explain why pawn breaks lead to a bad game? (I realize I'm asking you to lead me by the hand here, but that's exactly what I came here for).
Assuming it would indeed lead to a bad game, would @Martin0's suggestion to start with the pawns spawned in the usual positions address this issue?
Nov 27, 2017
0
#17
No sorry.
Just a waste of my time really.
I am playing my own test game right now.
Good luck
no problem and thanks.
What I am saying is that it is hard to make up a plan. Like in normal chess you can see f7 as a weakness since it is only protected by the king. Well, in this variant f7 is protected by many different stones. It is protected by the stones on d8, e8, f8, g8, h8, e7, g7 if you still have the right pieces left. So in classical chess f7 is protected once while in this variant it is protected 7 times (2 knights, 2 bishops/pawns, 2 rooks, 1 queen). Good luck finding enough attackers to win material there. And don't attack it with material that is worth too much since it is only a pawn and 2 of the recaptures can be made by pawns.
Ok, so there is no easy way to target weak pieces/squares in the enemy camp. What about attacking the opponents king? Also impossible since your opponent has no reason to reveal his king.
If I were to play a game I would make some pawn and knight moves. Then I would see no target to attack and being afraid of overextending I might just move my knights back and fourth. I would not reveal all my pawns, so I can lose some stones without loosing more than a pawn and I would only move my long ranged pieces if my opponent falls to a tactic. My king should never be moved until we reach an endgame.
If I were to play a game against myself, then the game would very likely end in a draw. I just can't come up with a reasonably good proactive plan. If there were a rule that would force me to exchange my stones for pieces, then this would change. For example if you have to replace one of your stones with a piece each turn, but were still free to move any piece (so you don't need to move the piece put on the board), then my strategy would become much different.
Interesting points. They seem reasonable, and I can't see any refutation. This is the kind of criticism I'd hoped to read in posting here. Thank you!
It does seem that your proposed variant (all pawns on board from the start) is better for this reason, though it's still possible to imagine spawning a knight or two and then stalling. I can also think of a more out-there variant to solve it:
"On your turn, you must replace any one of your stones with any one of your off-board pieces and then move the piece as normal. If you have no stones left, move with one of your pieces as normal."
This would be an unusual game indeed, but it would force exchange of stones for pieces.
I'm still trying to understand @game_designer's point about pawn-breaks, which would have some bearing on this discussion, however.
Thoughts?
I'm new to this forum. I came here because I recently concocted a Chess variant and I'm looking for constructive criticism. I'm not an expert player (though I do design/develop board games for a living). I'm looking for experts to critique it, find gaping holes, and generally tear it apart. Here you go:
Equipment: played with a normal Chess set plus sixteen white Go stones and 16 black Go stones. Each player takes ownership of all stones and pieces of one color.
Setup: Place the white and black stones on the board in the same spots where the white and black armies setup in normal Chess. Place all the Chess pieces next to the board.
Rules: Players take turns. On your turn, replace any one of your stones with any one of your off-board pieces and then move the piece as normal, or alternatively move any Chess piece you already have on board as normal.
Otherwise the rules are the same as FIDE Chess