How Can I Create a Variant?

Did I really forget the bishop?  Wow, that's silly.

Also, the King First thing actually explains a lot of the problems I've had where the King thinks he can move in more ways than he can.

Thanks for clarifying some issues.

Ok, I fixed that. Turns out it wasn't actually confused, but the move information it passed to XBoard was wrong (so you would see spurious moves indicated in XBoard). Still looking for the castling issue.

EDIT: I think I found that too. If there's a commented-out line in a piece description, it's interpreted as an empty line that terminates the piece description. I'll go and fix that, but the work-around is simple: move the commented out line to the end of the piece description.

Well, I've been gone for some time.  Things are going well with the variant, it's basically where I want it, except for that pesky 50 move rule.  I don't even know if you guys are still following this thread.

However, my friend and I have some general questions.  First, is it possible to make a piece that puts pieces it captures into a "prison," and the player can drop them on his turn like in Bughouse?  There's a flag for putting pieces that are captured into a prison, but what about the piece that does the capture?

Second, should we define piece values for Sjaak?  I know that Sjaak has its own method for determining what it thinks piece values are, but if we're pretty sure we know better is it preferable to define a value for it?

Last, is there a way to see how much value Sjaak gives to a piece?  I would like to know for a few reasons.

Ok, so I just happened to stumble across this thread again and only now see that you still had some questions. So at the risk of these no longer being relevant:

You can customise the 50-move rule to an extend with a "Rule: movecountdraw = 50" line. However, it can only be extended up to 64. You will also need to change the adjudication rules in XBoard.

"Capture to Holdings" is a game-rule, not a piece property. It cannot be made to depend on the piece that does the capturing. You can choose what side will get the pieces but there is no way to communicate that to XBoard, so it's not to useful in practice.

If you know piece values, you should use them, rather than letting SjaakII figure it out. If you want to see what value SjaakII would assign to the pieces, leave the piece value unspecified. Then start SjaakII from a terminal and type "pieceinfo". One of the things it prints is the piece value (as an opening/end game pair).

By the way, there's a new version (1.4.0) of SjaakII that has some new features.

Hi, are you willing to share, which ways of entertainment? Similar games to chess or what?