New chess variant. Looking for players to play with.

Shuuro is not complicated.
It uses the same pieces, only adds a twist that you can build your own army, which, by the way, is what I love the most about it. That makes interesting battles, makes some really neat mates with more knights and bishops, and so on.

I think you're still confusing the word 'simple' with something else.
Regular chess is simple, and as darth said, the proof is that children can learn it almost instantly.
It's not played on a huge board with a gajillion pieces like this variant.
It's rules are easy to understand, and obvious.
There's no side rule that states which piece are allowed to capture which piece (which is really weird to me, honestly).
You can get into it really easily, and can invest only little time and effort to learn it.
I don't see that with this variant.
The first second I looked at it, the image of people scratching their head in confusion, hunching over the board came into my mind.
It's messy. It's crowded. It's too much.

Sorry if I came out really offensive, English isn't my first language, and I still have problems making myself clear.

Your English is perfectly fine. I can understand you clearly.

No, I'm not. 

Have you actually tried teaching little children chess? What were the results?

As far as I remember, some of the kids have trouble remember which piece moves in what way, let alone how checkmate even works. (When you try to teach them and constantly remind them how the knight moves...I commend you with a medal if you were successful on your 2nd/3rd attempt.)

I think bearing these things in mind, the fact that the variant piece move in an unfamiliar way should be insignificant; even if there's merely more to remember for the "complicated" A.-O. game.

As far as I remember, this is exactly how I started out when learning chess: it was just one blob of a confusing mess. But hey, after playing for a while, see what I'm become with it?

Then again, all I'm about to do is repeat everything I've already stated. I guess to conclude this, we should just agree that we disagree.

Dear God, I tell you, ordinary chess is hard enough.

Acer, I'm personally not so much interested in the program as I'm interested in the variant itself. I think it has potential. If you read my previous posts, you would find a lot of encouragement from me, as I'm another player who actually wants to give it a try; and hope it might become some form of reality beyond just the Fairy-Max program. Hell, if I have enough finance to commission my craftsman to design an Alpha-Omega board, I wouldn't say I wouldn't possibly do it sometime in the future. Not joking. 

Having said that, I feel I want to give you a long word of critique, because I have a lot of ideas of my own for it. I do hope you take it all to heart.

(Actually, the long mid-section containing the critique has been edited out, after I re-read it a couple of times. Sometimes, I feel like I am a bit too condescending in my message to other people. While I didn't mean for it to be, I think this might be the reason why Acer569 hasn't posted in more than 5 days after having come back to this thread in more than several of months.

What I realized after re-reading my post is, it almost seemed as if I wanted to re-write his variant to fit my personal delight. There was beauty in his original set up, and I think I spent less time acknowledging it and more time criticizing it. I'm sure anyone behaving in that manner would be regarded annoyingly arrogant. Acer had reason to set up the board the way he/she does, and there is so much about how his variant came to be the way he/she likes it that I may not know of right now. 

Acer, I'm sure this doesn't take away from the irritation that I may have inflicked, but for what it's worth, I'm sorry for the infliction. I hope I haven't caused too much discouragement; because I really don't think you should be for something that's so intriguing and unique.

Instead of all my rock-headed criticism, I decided to simply show you my mere idea of how I think the arrangement of pieces and dimension of board might work better, and nothing more. Please read my most recent post in this thread; which happens to be the latest reply.

What still remains true is,) I can see this variant moving in a positive direction. One thing that helps it move forward is the fact that the pieces move in a rather intriguing way, especially the Cobra and the Hawk. Hey, I'm sure at least a few of us are sick to death with the boring conventional moves of the Bishop, Rook and Queen. How about a little more "spice" to the game? To put it shortly.

What I pity of those other members who say that they don't want to try it because it looks like a big confusing "mess" is, as I see it, they are missing out on an opportunity to make something potentially decent possibly become reality. How could anything in life come into fruition if one always hold onto that kind of discrouaging attitude, right?

Take this with a grain of salt since I won't have time to test any of your game until the weekend. These are some first impressions based on my experience with similar variants:

1) The board appears to be too narrow. The range of movement for many pieces will be stifled and your own units will "smother" others. Maybe making the board wider will help.

2) Some of the piece movements appear arbitrary, which reduces some of the "elegance" of the game. This might not impair how fun it is but will make it harder to learn. Perhaps the overal variety count could be reduced by combining similar units into one, the way current chess pieces were when Courier Chess gave way to International. I'll have to test to see which specifically would have the best synergy/combination potential though.

Ultimately though, I like where your game seems to be coming from/going. I love creating variants and this one intrigues me.

(post edited out

Please read previous post to know why.)

Acer, it is your very rational idea of putting similar pieces close together to make their powers easier to learn that made me create the hypothetical re-arrangement in the first place. 

Much of what you recently said re-confirms my favor of the re-arrangement over your original arrangement. If you consult my diagram, all pieces of similar power (The diagonals: Bishops and Cardinals and Hawks; Knight-powered pieces: Knight, Cobra and Armored Knights; orthogonals: the Rooks, Seige Towers and Champions) are assembled into the familiar Bishop-Knight-Rook alignment, which should greatly aid in easy learning.

Placement for easy learning isn't the only issue I see with the original set up. Without having to "play a game or two" of the original, I can plainly see from visual analysis (and from your youtube videos) that the Armored Knight, Hawk, Lion and Jester are all blocked by the pawns and cannot readily move out until the larger long-ranged pieces have. In that case, we might as well just not have these extra short-ranged pieces, since the long-rangers are already out on the "battlefield", if you will, performing their long-ranged tactics, see? To re-iterate, it would make sense from this regard that your short-ranged invented pieces come out first. And so, that is why, in my re-arrangement, all your invented pieces (other than the Jester) can readily do this; and do it without a pawn or another piece interferring. I have made it so that all the pieces, except for 3, can move out and fill the entire row proceeding the pawns, creating an array of options for opening tactics to thrive.

On that tangent, you mentioned opening tactics which created the dimensions of the board. I'm still convinced, as before, that Cortez has a fine point: Your 10x12/14 board is simply too crowded! I don't see how having something slightly wider, like my 12x12 re-configuration, would hinder any opening tactics or prevent the Queen/King from nicely guarding/castling. In fact, one would think a wider board may even help in the former regard, since there's more room for them to thrive.

As far as having too wide a board making it too long for the Queen to guard or the King to castle, if anything, I would think it would be expected of larger variants. A larger 12x12 shouldn't be too big a problem, since both sides will take equally long to perform these maneuvers. In fact, in this larger re-configuration, it can take as little as 5 or 6 moves for castling and guarding to be available. (And then, if you want to add an aditional rule where castling and guarding can be performed with the Seige Towers, it would take even less time! If the ST is a Rook-related piece, why not allow it to also protect the King and Queen? This was just a neat little idea that I had for a while.)

Basically, by having a narrow board just so that guarding and castling can happen slightly quicker, you're ultimately sacrificing a whole array of benefits that a larger board can bring, notably that there's a larger play space and more tactical/strategical positions to be had. 

As far as clarifying the move of the Lion goes, I'm assuming we're using this Lion, right?

"The lion can:

• move directly to a green square, capturing or not.
• move directly to any red square, leaping over intervening pieces if necessary, capturing or not.
• capture on a green square and return to its starting square in the same move. Such a capture is called igui.
• move to a green square and return to its starting square in the same move, effectively passing. (I'm not sure what the benefit of this manneuver is, since technically, the Lion hasn't moved)
• capture on a green square, and then either move to any adjacent green or red square, capturing or not. Thus the lion can capture two pieces in one turn.

"

I can't use the Fairy-Max program to learn its move, because Alpha-Omega doesn't work beyond the first use of it after installation, which is why I asked here to begin with. But, it looks like this is the lion piece we're talking about. Am I correct?

As for the loin he can not leap at all. He soley moves as a king, twice. He also most move twice, even if he takes a pieces on the first king move. He is not allowed to only move one time. He also can not end his turn on the same square he started his turn on.

Lastly he can not take a protected lion, or be taken by another lion, if protected.

You should download my game and give it a try. That is the only why you can truely see how the pieces work with each other. As well as what and which work best with different cercumstances.(sorry about the spelling. The spell check is not working)

Well, it certainly took you long enough to come back and reply. ^-^ I was kind of missing you and wondering if you were still interested in the topic.

I'm going to be frank in this post; I hope you find constructiveness in it.

I find it hard to believe that short-rangers will "clog up" the board and obstruct long rangers just because they are placed in the front.  Since their powers aren't as strong as the long-rangers, they are supposed to be the first to battle and be sacrificed, in order to make way for the more powerful pieces, while the more powerful pieces protect them from behind, right? That's what we usually use the Knight for: normally, we move it out first, alongside the pawns, so that we can later develop the Bishops and Queen, while the Bishops and Queen "has its back"; the Knight "clogs up" the paths for neither the Bishop nor the Queen. As I mentioned before, if the long-ranged major and moderate pieces (Queen, Rook, and Bishop) are already out doing the work, what's the use of having the short-ranged leapers to begin with? The long-rangers are already climactically doing the nasty work.

Usually, we don't need to use the prowess of the long-rangers' longer range until the board  clears up, which is during mid- and endgame. For example, how often do we players require the Queen to move over 5, 6 or 7 squares at the beginning of the game? Almost never. (In fact, didn't they teach us that while it's tempting to move the Queen out early on the board and use her for almost everything, it's not the best to rely too heavily and primarily on the more powerful pieces at the start of the game, most especially since they (Queen and Rooks) are often a favorite target for capture? :P)

On the other hand, your pieces will get clogged up if they aren't organized optimally by placing similar pieces together (which you say was your goal, and which I had helped you achieve) and, more importantly, if you don't have a wider board; the arrangement you have is simply too small.

A lot of this seems very suppositional. Can you actually post a previous game on youtube that has a different set up to the one you have now? I want to see specifically how the long ranged pieces would be obstructed if they were placed in the back versus the front.

My e-mail notices are made lae. I just received a reply notice, sorry.

you guys should play chinese go, chess or japenses shogi!

Cpwn, what does that have to do with the chess variant at hand?

We're here to have discussions abou it and not Shogi. Please show a little more respect to the creation of this author, especially since he put a lot of hard work into it. You wouldn't want other people to diverge off into subjects on Xiangqi and Makruk when you're trying to talk about your Chess inventions now, would you?

Acer, thanks for your lengthy response. I'll get back to them  within the nextffew days. There's a lot I would like to say but unfortunately do not have much time until then.

There is real vision in this variant. Just looking at it gives me a vibe like Warhammer for scale and complexity.