Making a standard and Uniforming names & rules of fairy pieces, to make chess variants become easier

Hi,

There is no regulations concerning chess variant invention especially for the fairy pieces. Probably making some standards for Fairy Chess Piece invention, giving names, rules is the most important thing to be done. This will still keep us free to let our imagination flow, but it will make it easier for future development and invention of pieces and chess variants.

As an inventor of chess pieces and chess variants i'm well placed to see that using a piece with the same name but with a different rule isn't easily accepted.

That's why i would like to start a common project with all the persons willing to participate in it.

1) Try to find a way to make the fairy pieces become easily identified.

2) Rewrite the chess encyclopedia of chess variants with these standards, naturally a part concerning the History of the invention of these chess variants and the historic name given to the pieces is important.

3) Enrich the chess encyclopedia with the newest and Latest Chess Variants and Chess ideas.

I suggest we create a google group where we can share ideas, diagrams (we must illustrate the rules of the pieces and explain them. We must also agree on the ways to illustrate these diagrams. There are many programs available for this including HG Muller tool http://www.chessvariants.com/invention/interactive-diagrams and Board Painter http://musketeerchess.net/tools/boardpainter/).

Here is the Google Group i created: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/chess-variants-encyclopedia-project

I need moderators for this group so we can share the work

Best regards

Zied

OK.

Thanks Zied, I have found the musketeer boardpainter tool very easy to use. It has the basic symbols for jumping (curved arrow), sliding (dots or long arrow), and capturing "X".

Also, see (list-of-unconventional-pieces) started by HorusTheThird for a little bit of work that was already started to show some pieces.

It might be useful for describing games to have some standard naming convention, but there are so many possible pieces that giving each one a unique name would not be easy. Especially if you want the names to be simple. A truly comprehensive system should probably ignore traditional names, and break all pieces down into fundamental properties.

The difficulty is that many of the characteristics of chess pieces are assumed. For example, it is possible to devise pieces that occupy more than one space on the board. How would that be accounted for in a classification system? Chess pieces can also have innumerable special rules, such a en passant or promotion. There could be pieces that can rotate, or change movement based on the rank they're on, or become more powerful after capturing, or can enter special areas of the board, or anything else a creative game designer can imagine. This massive range of possibilities is what makes chess so interesting.

I think a truly universal classification system should describe every important detail of each piece. There could be some standard characteristics that are assumed unless otherwise indicated, such as moving on a square grid, only occupying one space, and capturing by moving onto the target piece; but other possibilities should be accounted for too.

I'd give preference to the oldest most historical names, and only deviate from this if there are strong reasons for it. An example is the cannon for the Xiangqi piece - it makes perfectly sense to keep that that way.

Do you have some criteria before adding any piece to your list? Otherwise it might become really long:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/invent-the-new-worst-chess-piece-ever

This seems a hopeless endeavor. The chess-variants landscape is populated with small but fanatical groups that care only about 'their' variant, and would never be willing to change the naming they are used to to that taken from some other variant. E.g. people that play Seirawan Chess will always think of the Archbishop as a Hawk, and the Chancellor as an Elephant. The pieces they bought even look that way.

Apart from that, each language usually has its own naming system of chess pieces, which are not translations of each other. I heard that in Russia the name Elephant is already in use for what in English is called Bishop.

Also note that the chessvariants.com website, which in this internet age should be considered the leading source of information on chess variants, already features an extensive 'piececlopedia'.

Which reminds me of the Dwarf: moves like a King, without royalty, just like the Guard, but  you can only capture a Dwarf if you're attacking it with two or more pieces.

standardizing fairy chess is missing the point of fairy chess. imo anyway

My thought is that it is impossible to assign a common name to each piece, because there are probably many pieces that have been designed that don't have unique names, or else have been invented multiple times under different names.

The most rational way to do this, I believe, is to describe each piece, and then come up with a list of acceptable names for each description. Thus, you wouldn't have to restrict the name 'elephant' to just one piece; but rather could have a list of all possible pieces that have been represented by that name, as well as a list of all possible names associated with each of those pieces; using the name of the game or language in which each different elephant appears to distinguish them. So the seirawan elephant would be different from the shatranj elephant, but both are elephants.

I suppose I'm thinking of this as more of a comprehensive classification scheme than a standard naming system. It would be nice to just have a list of all the different pieces that have ever been represented by a particular name, and all the names that have ever been used for a particular piece; along with an unambiguous description of each piece.