Variant: Petrified

I just lost a game of  "Variant: Petrified"

I do not know why or how , but the opponent just claimed the win in a lost position.

Is there a special rule or something that i missed?

Here is the game link : https://www.chess.com/variants/petrified/game/49759345/65/3

Not sure but you only have a king so can't win.

• Pieces turn to stone when they capture, except pawns. Kings cannot capture. Win by checkmate or stalemate.

You might want to ask in the Variants club:

https://www.chess.com/club/variants

I had a rook and 5 pawns that could turn into whatever, so winning would have been easy.

But even if not, it would not explain why I lost the game.

Ah, it's hard to tell from the screen. Your best bet is still checking in that club. The developers are admins there.

Hey there, Variants admin here.

Some variants (like petrified) are point based. You gain points for capturing enemy pieces. With this in mind the King (in this variant) has an intrinsic value of 20 points. This means that when an opponent is 21 points (basically more than 20) ahead of you they can "claim" their win. Effectively instead of resigning and losing automatically they resign and lose 20 points, but they're still winning.

Hope this helps, I went in a bit of a circle with my explanation there, sorry 😁

The point rule is denoted by a capital "P" in the top right corner of the screen (above chat). In general, any variant with a "game of points" ruleset will have a claim win option in the scenario I described above. (In your game you had 7 points vs the opponents' 28, so when they claimed the win, you gained 20 points but were still behind by a point.)

Four player chess, chaturaji and many of the custom variants (community made) are also games of points.

I like Petrified Chess. But I lost a number of games due to my opponents claiming the win. I hardly see the point of scoring here because the strategy of Petrified is often the opposite of point based strategy. I would say point system kills the spirit of Petrified chess.

I tried many times to embed my Petrified Chess game here, but I failed. Anyway this is the game.

https://www.chess.com/variants/petrified/game/50966684/64/3

Ignoring scoring system, it's obvious Black is totally winning here. But the rule of Petrified chess forces players to play "point based strategy", effectively killing trapping strategy.

I'll stop playing Petrified chess just because of this point rule.

what happens in repetation when we have more points