New chess variant. Looking for players to play with.

HGMuller wrote:

Ace569er wrote:

I need to find a Metamachy set for most of my pieces... Unless someone can think of something better?

You mean as depicted here?

 

I suppose great minds think alike. haha

But, on the other hand, a few of these pieces kind of sort of look like my invented pieces. (Which I was hoping to post to the "Post your Set" thread.)

What to do now? ^-^

I had never heard of 'Metamachy', but when I started Googling it, it brought me to this wonderful History-of-Chess website, where I found the first picture I posted in the Metamachy description. Two of the unorthodox pieces there looked quite familiar (because I actually own those). In the page I linked to here, it is actually explained where the pieces are from. The Elephant and Cannon in the Metamachy picture come from a Staunton Xiangqi set (of course). The other two (used as Camel and Prince) from an exotic design for normal Chess (where they were Knight and King).

I don't know if these other sets can still be easily obtained somewhere. I know that Superchess is still alive and kicking, though: Oct 17 was the 12th Dutch championship for it. They sell dozens of different pieces; the set depicted above is one of the smallest. They are not very cheap, but for pretty large wooden pieces, not unreasonably priced. (The Exchess 1 set with 2x8 pieces (you get two of each of the two Pawn models) costs 40 Euro.)

Exchess set 2:

Exchess set 3:

I like my own handiwork on a Staunton Cannon too:

I like your cannon too, Muller. So much to reply too. I'm overwelmed to even read it all.

Thank you for the links for pieces. That should help me a good bit.

All the stuff about the winboard P2P & server confused me a little. I understand the majority of it tho. I'll reread it a few more times. I'm sure I'll get a better understanding. Thanks for stopping by.

I can confirm what Ace says: Chu Shogi is played on a 12x12 board and features both a Lion and Queen as they appear in Ace's variant. The conventional wisdom there is that a Lion is worth 20 Pawns, and a Queen 12. (Chu-Shogi Pawns are different from FIDE Pawns, however, as they only have a single capture straight ahead, which presumably makes them less valuable, so it is not obvious how to translate this to a FIDE scale. This will not affect the ratio L/Q, though.)

The Lion is a devastating piece. It basically sweeps clean the board wherever it goes, the only defense being to disperse your pieces out of its path (as protecting them would not help). So it is a good thing that it moves at a modest pace. The exception is when there is sufficiently clear field to have two orthogonal sliders cover two adjacent ranks from far away; a Lion cannot cross such an exclusion zone unaided. In Chu Shogi the Side Movers are the ideal pieces for this; here you would have to use the more-expensive Rooks.

Even on 8x8 a piece that attacks the same squares as a Lion with an unblockable leap, but does not have the double-capture power, is worth about 1.5 Pawn more than Queen, i.e. about 12. (Note that the power to jump to the second square for a Queen on 8x8 is worth almost exactly as much as all Queen moves more distant than 3 steps together, and it is significantly better to have the 8 unblockable Knight leaps than it is to have the 8 move targets at distance 3 which are each blockable in two places!)

I guess one reason your calculation of 2x King value fails is because a Lion is not K+K, but more like KxK: a King attacks 8 squares, but with two King steps you would attack 24 squares, not 8+8=16. (And then you are lucky that of the 64 combinations there are so many transpositions; a 'di-Knight' would attack 40 squares!) And the value of short-range leapers is (lightly) non-linear in the number N of moves, like 1.1*(30 + 5/8*N)*N on 8x8, which for N=24 indeed is about 12, but for N=16 would be only 7.

Thank you Muller, I could not have said it that well if I tried. I simply do not know enough about how chess ranking work, to give that much detail. I just know from playing that a queen don't touch the power of the mighty lion. So thank you for helping me explain that in a more understanding way.

How about just Chess 960?

Not enough to it. It would bore me like normal chess. I like a lot of options. I like seeing many different opening set ups. Not just the few best.

No. There's nothing wrong with Chess the way it is so of course, we don't need you to reinvent the wheel. I'll stick with Chess instead of your game.

960 different starting position is not enough?

The guy literally thinks he one upped chess. "It's not complex enough for me so here - Let's play with Wizards and Lions!". He's clearly a total, total mouth breather.

lol, So clueless. I don't think any game is better or not. I just hate being bored seeing the same shit over & over. With little reason to do otherwise. Simply because it is not logical. One is not better than the other. I simply prefer to have options that hold more vaule. Not to mention far more reply fun with more chance to see different things. Same reason I like 4 way chess. Please think before speaking next time. You are only making yourself look stupid.

Right...You're the one wasting all of your time on this ridiculous garbage nobody cares about and yet it's ME who looks stupid. I got it.

That still doesn't answer your problem with 960.
Let's just say that there are currently a few hundred main lines that we see today in grandmaster play.
Assuming you don't spend as much time as a grandmaster studying chess, you'll never learn even half of them; and by the time you do that, another generation has made their own contribution to theory, spawning another dozen of main lines, while current theory get set aside.
And then you say you see the same shit over and over?
Mate, chess changes every single game.

Acer, you mentioned multiple things that I haven't gotten to yet. Please give me a few more days yet again. =D

Welll, isn't long-post taggin that has happened for months in a row FUN? ^-^

Actually, I was going to come to correct myself on this (Unfortunately, I was student teacher-aiding today, so I didn't have the time in my schedule): Your analysis of the High Priestess, the promotional piece in my variant, returned that it is slightly more powerful than the Queen at ~9.75 points. After re-visiting the piece, I saw that the High Priestess contains about 2/3 of the Lion; or perhaps 1/2, depending on how much one emphasizes the importance of double-capture.

Since this particular discussion is based on  whether or not 2 Lions are 1 too many, I still somehow believe, however, that it isn't and would in fact be beneficial. Material points was just one factor I considered. Another is, the fact that a larger board would work well with more of the powerful pieces; especially since we have a lot of short-rangers that, while having leaping abilities, struggle to efficiently get places, especially afar.

lol Right, Warbringer...

Except, this variant wasn't created in response to anything wrong with FIDE chess.

Unless, surely, that's your pre-existing opinion of why any or all variants exist?  :P

No he isn't. At least 6 people have expressed some form of support and even excitement for Ace's innovation. I say, one person's time-wasted "garbage" is another's time-valued treasure. Tolerance wins over dogmatism.

Chess wasn't a game that was developed over one night and forever was what it's been; we're always improving on it, and there are always new chess games that are derived from it, as it and its cousins have been derived from previous chess games. In fact, the Western one we know today is only 500-years-old. If I'm not mistaken (though I don't think I've lost very much of my point if I am), aren't the en pessant and castling maneuvers even younger than that?

SO,

Speak for yourself, dude; especially since your the one mis-interpretting Ace's "not enough" statement. Guess what? It should occur to you that English (likely) isn't his first language. (In the same manner that he said  "stupid", his post on my "points being FAR FROM VALID" would seem equally in my face, and I know he wasn't meaning it like that.) He's struggling in a non-primary tongue to get people to understand his ideas, all the while spending time to create something awesome so that people do enjoy it. Even if it doesn't turn out successful, which you say it isn't (and, which we don't actually know until the end), he doesn't deserve to be insulted for at least trying.

Please do not continue to criticize him on "being stupid" and a " waste of time". He can't be bothered by the likes of that kind of behavior.

Right on. More power to you.

*sigh* people on chess.com rely too much on the Scarecrow, don't they?

I think that when Ace said "not enough to it", he means that he is merely intrigued to do more; not that FIDE isn't sufficient.

You have distorted Ace's position by completely eluding the fact that we're dealing with new pieces with new and original powers that are different than FIDE chess. 960 doesn't deal with these (obviously, that is what he mean when he said "same shit over and over") because all it does is change pieces around.

I have to agree with Ace that 960 is, indeed, the "same shit", since a new random starting position is hardly significantly different than a game that has already progressed into mid-game or end-game; seeing that mid-/end-games are different each time. And, hey, we aren't even allowed to castle! (Not saying that 960 wouldn't be fun, just that it's not as stimulating in variation as you're trying to argue.)

I invite you to consider this: how many pieces in Ace's variant here leap and take on new intimidating powers of capture and movement? (Lion piece, for example) And then, how many do just this in 960 and regular FIDE otherwise? While new advanced/abstract pieces aren't your thing (by now, it's obvious; we get it), is this really something to throw under the carpet?