New chess variant. Looking for players to play with.

It's just the nature of variants. Since it's not official, we inventors of them update and change them all the time.

I can't begin to count how many times I have changed the rules of the Magician, including her power of movement and capture and her conditions for promotion. The "official" rules that stand today probably aren't actually even official, for there maybe new inspirations around the corner to update her even more. ^-^

It's just the nature of variants. Since it's not official, we inventors of them update and change them all the time.

I can't begin to count how many times I have changed the rules of the Magician, including her power of movement and capture and her conditions for promotion.

One of the hard things is truly knowing when a piece is good enough to work, because "good enough" is too subjective to each player. The point of fact is that Ace didn't randomly assemble these pieces just to look good: he had an indepth analysis as to how the pieces interprotect each other whne they move out and how conveniently they can move out. Even if I don't agree completely with his analysis, one does exist.

So I was curious Battlechess, do you feel the first opening post, I updated. Looks both easier to understand and play? I change how I displayed movement of pieces to the best I can think of doing it as well.

Actually a PGN game is nearly as good as a video to those who downloaded WinBoard. You just copy-paste it into WinBoard, and the latter will start auto-playing the game in front of your eyes like it was a video. And PGNs are much easier to create and post than real videos.

Really? I did not even know I could do that....Not sure if I understand how. It does sound a whole lot easier. So I found 2 vizagapatam-TAJ style chess set I will be useing for the pieces on the two different real boards I'm making, this week. Costing only $35 each.

I am going to make the king the lion, queen the fool. bishops the cardinals, rooks the towers, & knights the armoured knights. To go with a normal set, of simular wood color, for the rest of the normal pieces.
Then two pawns with the tops cut off for jacks. Two pawns for gambits.(So I'll have 4 extra vizagapatam style pawns, to work with. Might do some form of modded top for two Like Muller did for his connon.)

So I will still need two-snakes, elephants, & hawks. I like the enchantess set 3 from The site muller showed me. Yet I would need two of them at $95+ each. That is too much. Plus I can't match the wood. So the pieces look like they're all from one set. http://www.superschaak.nl/newpieces-Set3.htm

So still looking for a cheaper way. If I lath the four extra pwns, I'll have. I can make the elephants and hawks...maybe? Would still need the snakes.

Found the pieces for the 2snakes, 2elephants, and 2hawks & 2wizards.(might rename those) So I'll have my ful set. This one is only $20. So all 3 to make my full set of 72 pieces will cost me under $70. Not bad. All fom the small two woods too. So it will look like one complete set. Not some pieced together one. Everything is Sheesham & boxwood.

In the File menu WinBoard has items for Save Game and Load Game, which you can use to save the current game (in PGN format) on a file, or recall it from there. (More games canbe saved to the same file; on Load Game you then get to see a list of games you can select from.) In the Save Game Options dialog you can even specify that games should be saved automatically (and where) when they finish.

But you can also use the Edit menu items Copy Game To Clipboard and Paste Game From Clipboard to copy-paste the game to/from somewhere else, like a forum posting. The accelerator keys for this are the usual Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V, which you can type any time the board window has focus. Forpasting into WinBoard the game doesn't have to be actual PGN format; WinBoard will understand almost anything that remotely looks like a sequence of Chess moves. If it is not PGN that specifies variant and initial position in tags, however, you must have pre-selected the applicable variant, however.

When you load a game by whichever method WinBoard will start stepping through it ('auto-playing') with a step rate you can specify in the Load Game Options dialog. (Specifying 0 there brings you to the final position instantly; disabling it will always leave you in the initial position. Fractional seconds are accepted.)

Pieces are beautiful, btw!

Thank you for taking the time, Ace.

However, some of my minor difference in opinion still stands: that the Queen and King should be placed in the back, and the arrangement of some of the picees could be better placed together by related movement type.

On the other hand, Ifound a rather simple solution to resolving the two lions issue, if that's really the only substantial issue to my original re-configuration (you stated in a previous post that two Cobras shouldn't be too big a deal as two Lions): simply invent a new Royal piece that is more or less powerful than the Queen and replace one of the two Lions with it. I did just this.

The Pheonix (or the Stymphalion)

Power - The Pheonix/Stymphalian is a leaper. (As typical of most my invented pieces) It's power of movement is different from its power of capture, similarly to the pawn. It can move in the Knight's unorthodox L-Shape or exactly two squares in any of the 8 orthodox directions creating a ring shape for the possible squares it can occupy. It does not have the option to move just one square at a time like a King, unless it is capturing.

When it captures, it does so 1 or 2 squares forwards, backwards, sideways, diagonally or Knight's L-shape. The Pheonix/Stymphalion can move to a total of 16 possible squares. It can capture on a total of 24 possible squares.

When leaping forwards, backwards, sideways, diagonally or L-shaped over an enemy piece to capture another enemy piece two squares away, the target enemy piece and the one(s) being leaped over are both/all captured. (When L-shape capture is performed, the Pheonix/Stymph. is technically leaping over 2 squares; both those squares are susceptible to capture.) In this, a total of 3 possible enemy pieces can be captured by it.

When leaping over an enemy piece simply to move and not to capture, the leaped enemy piece merely becomes unmoveable during the opponent's next turn. The leaped enemy piece resumes activity afterwards, unless it is leaped over again.

(The images have been sized to fit chess.com's border definition. To see the full size of these images, simply open these images in a new tab.)

If anything, Ace, we can have your Alpha-Omega Chess game and my variation to it as official variants at the same time. No one said that that isn't allowed. ^-^

That way, we can always mutually and respectfully disagree, while people can try whichever version they think they'll like better.

If ever I were to introduce mine, I would always acknowledge it as a daughter game to your original.

Not clear. Can a Phoenix capture as a King or not? Your text seems to suggest that. Also not clear is whether the Phoenix can capture 3 pieces in one move, when it makes a Knight jump, or whether it has to choose one of the two intervening pieces.

The Betza description of (my interpretation of) the Phoenix would be mNmAmDmctpafhcK. Meaning in can make non-capturing (m) leaps directly to the Knight, Alfil and Dabbaba squares irrespective of the occupancy of any other square, and then move (m), capture (c) or hop an own piece (tp) King-wise, followed by (a = again) a King capture (c) in the 'forward-half' (fh) direction. No way to indicate the paralysis effect in Betza notation, and WinBoard wouldn't understand paralyzing anyway. Could be that another cK has to be prefixed, if the Phoenix can also execute normal King captures.

The Phoenix would definitely be a lot weaker than the Lion. What makes the Lion so strong is that it can choose from 8 squares to retreat to, after making a locust capture. So that it almost always can make that capture unpunished. The Phoenix can only choose between 3 squares to perform a locust capture on a neighbor, and then only if those are occupied by an enemy. Which presumably would be protected, if it is there at all. So it cannot capture with impunity like the Lion.

I used a similar method to keep the strength of the Wolf in Werewolf Chess within limits. It is a range-three Queen, which can jump directly to the second square (which in itself would then make it exactly as strong as a normal Queen), but which then can optionally capture an enemy piece it jumps over. Because the square you have to go to make such a capture is fixed, it is reasonably easy for the opponent to defend against it, by not only protecting the threatened piece itself, but also the square behind it. So this extra double-capture potential isn't worth that much.

HGMuller, my post has been updated to answer the questions that you're asking.

The Pheonix/Stymph. cannot move like the King. It can, however, capture like the King.

And, yes, it does capture a possible total of 3 pieces in an L-shape capture.

Paralysis was a new concept that I brainstormed and became rather proud of. I was hoping that it would make it into one of my variants. It's unfortunate that WinBoard couldn't stimulate it.

Well, there are other aspects of Ace's game WinBoard does not enforce either, like one piece type only being able to capture a sub-set of other piece types. But that shouldn't be much of a problem: the user can simply refrain from the things that are forbidden, (i.e. capturing pieces you are not supposed to capture, or moving pieces supposed to be paralysed), even though WinBoard would allow them to. The opponent is there to check them.

The design of WinBoard is based on such opponent checking: if you play against an AI ('engine'), the engine can refuse moves (presumably based on rule details too subtle for WinBoard to know), and WinBoard would undo them in that case. It is already a huge improvement that the AI can tell WinBoard how the pieces move, such that obviously illegal moves can be refused by WinBoard even without passing them to your opponent (and the legal moves can be highlighted when you pick up the piece).

Also what size square is best for four inch lion(tallest piece)? figuring between 1.75-2.25.

Renaming a few pieces for play off of winboard(winboard forced some names on me, based on symbles I had to use). Not that it matters much, but here they are.

hawk=pheonix-X,  elephant=dragon-D, snake=assassin-A. Rest are the same. prince and princess are repersented by Y & Z. Armoured knight is now Holy Palidin-H. So the 19 pieces are: LKQFYZBCXRTDNHAWGJP

Finally How much would you give each of the 19 pieces on the bottom board?

I changed the fool's moves to be a cardinal+tower. To mirror the queen. And make more useful. I also removed 4 squares from the snake/assassin . So that he mirrors the wizard. Piece S is now WZ. The snake was WNZ. Wizard is FC for reference. Now every single piece mirrors each other. Except the Gamibit.

G Z C H C Z G     W = Wazir     (1,0)
Z A N D N A Z     F = Ferz      (1,1)
C N F W F N C     D = Dabbaba   (2,0)
H D W * W D H     N = Knight    (2,1)
C N F W F N C     A = Alfil     (2,2)
Z A N D N A Z     C = Camel     (3,1) 
G Z C H C Z G     Z = Zebra     (3,2)

My guess was .5pawn, 1 jack, 3 hawk, 4 knight & tower, 5 gambit & cardinal, 5.5 Elephant & wizard, 6 bishop, 7snake, 8 prince & princess, 9 AKn now Holy Palidin, 10 Fool/jester, 11 Rook, 18 Queen, 26 Lion. King?

I'm willing to try this game.

Ace, would you be willing to create my configuration in Winboard? (Pheonix included)

Also, on the topic of buying physical luxury chess sets to represent your invented pieces, which I've been wanting to address but kept forgetting to: I would highly discourage it, namely because those pieces are already defined as their specific pieces in their stylistic sets; customers somewhere in the world own these sets and are treating them as the King, Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook and pawn that they were created to be. If you're trying to sell your Alpha-Omega set, we will, firstly, run into this clashing problem of confusion and, secondly, a combined problem with aesthetic appearance and possible copyright infringement: combining pieces that do not have the same design, coupled with the fact that you're selling designs that are not your own, is spelling a recipe for disaster. Now, selling other people's work itself may not be so much the issue, since that's a ubiquitous practice that people rarely think twice about (House of Staunton is the distributor that sells Amritsar Ivory Work's chess sets, even though they claim to be the manufacturer of the sets; which is a (legal?) llie, though I'm not butting into their business), but creating an unoriginal set of pieces based on previous models and giving them new names are definitely a more substantial concern.

Here, your "Elephants" look like Knights. That's because they are Knights in the set that they were created for. (I suppose your one recourse could be that your "Elephant" is really the Champion piece from Dan MacDonald's Omega Chess, and the Champion's alleged human characteric representation is supposed to be a warrior, which the Knight's human representation also is. So, there you go.)  And then, your Wizard piece (also from MacDonald's Omega Chess,  only you kept the original name for this piece) is actually the Bishop(?) piece from this set. (In the original Omega Chess, isn't the Wizard's 2d symbol a cresent moon?) I don't know what the tallest piece in this picture is supposed to be (Queen?), and I don't know which of your invented pieces it's supposed to represent, but never the less, it was made to be the piece that it was meant to for the set.

Since you're a woodworker, I'm curious: why don't you simply lathe and carve your own pieces? I totally encourage you to try it! Not only will it be a lot of fun getting your hands on some very nice exotic woods or domestic wood (whichever you fancy) and then turning them into circular beauties, you don't have to rely on pre-existing pieces to make up your set; you will have your own original set! I'm sure it will be a very rewarding experience. And hey, you can sell it for a lot more. 

Unless of course you decide either not to use high-quality exotic wood or not to create a luxury set, or both, than you can always sell it for affordably cheaper. That option is valid, too. ^-^ lol

In fact, I have some nice ideas as to what your set's pieces could look like. I can show you some of my own chess variant pieces that I have rendered using a 3d model program, if you'd like. I've created them as blueprints for the head woodworker at Amritsar Ivory Works (the creator of House of Staunton's luxury chess sets) and have paid them to create these new invented pieces in line with the designs of the sets that I have bought. I can send them in PM, if you like. 

Sure I'd love to see you 3D drawings. Hopefully they are on Sketchup not CAD. I have a few sets. I plan on getting a 3d printer. Till then it is too expensive to have them made for me.
  I have no lathe. Could use one but most of what I what would need to be carved.
  I do plan on modding the pieces. I'll show a pic when it is all set. I'm useing 1 7/8 tile for the one board, that is staggered up light, down dark. Tile is not cheap at al......Then a 18'+ of 2x2 wood dowel for the crazy stagger on the other board.
As for laws for selling. That is child's play to get around. I am selling custom boards. The pieces come free as a gift for buying a custom board. Also II'm not trying to make much money on it. Mainly cover cost & time. I don't see people spending top dollar on a variant. Tho anyone who has one is likely to try to play.
I realy need to figure out how I want the board laid out so I can finish building it. Show me a few ideas. If you use winboard it's soooo much easier. I do want 16x14. With 6 to 8 square gone per quarter. There must be three void squares on the king row of the king side. With pieces; Lx1, Kx1, Qx1, Fx1, Yx1, Zx1, Bx2, Cx2, Xx2, Rx2, Tx2, Dx2, Nx2, Hx2, Ax2, Wx2, Gx6, Jx8, Px8