You Can Win 4-Player Chess By Resigning?

In this position where there were only 2 of us playing I just resigned because I was about to lose a knight, but the game said I won anyway because I had more points. Is this supposed to happen?

I would say no but it is still in testing so there are certainly some kinks in it.

Far as I know, game ranking is based soley on points, or what purpose to points?  Notice how resigning leaves you in the game?  I presume because you could win.

It might be the best tactic if there are only two of you left and you are ahead by less than 15 points, and are about to be checkmated. Then resigning ends the game and you win, and playing on and being checkmated loses you the game (because your opponent gets 15 points for doing that).

How do you find the 4 player chess?

https://www.chess.com/4-player-chess

Thats bad design. If you resign u should lose the game

yes

From what I've been reading the player with the most points wins. So if you get really far ahead you can just "retire" and win the game. The resign button should probably be changed to "retire" or something similar.

That's not the real rules though...

 You can also win by timing out - which I think is abusing the time-out system of point allocation imo - since it doesn't class as a resignation(?!), the points get distributed in a strictly fixed player turn order.

Lost several games today that way, since, if you aren't up the full points to claim a win (say just under 20), you can just let the timer run out, and, even if the other player isn't in the game anymore, they still get the points over your opponent. Which is often a doubly punishing effect, as it raises another's score by 20pts, further skewing the rankings away from the play over the board.

Four Players has been around for a very long time, more than a century.

There are many different versions of it, sometimes the board is different, sometimes the rules are different, sometimes both are different.

The most common type of board like the one that is used on this website first appeared around 1880.

Stating that you invented 4 Players also known as 4 Ways or as 4 Hands may be a bit misleading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-player_chess

http://www.chessvariants.com/books.dir/4handed/index.html

four player chess is all about who gets the most points at the end of the game so if I got 50 and the person behind me s got 23 and we're the only two left I can resign. He (the second place person) will get 20 points for being the last man standing but of course doesn't matter anymore. Gather points early. So that we it boils down to this you'll have the luxury of resigning and still win the game.

is the 4-player chess server down?

This is an old thread, and some rules have been changed in how the scoring here for 4-player free-for-all works, but I thought I'd update it to note why it's desirable to have the "Claim Win" feature.

4-player chess is a very different game from regular 2-player chess, and chess.com clearly designed 4-player to reward aggressive play, not just being the last man standing. If it didn't, what you'd see is an extremely boring game where every player is trying first and foremost to conserve his resources for the end of the game, instead of playing aggressively to go after the army of, and eventually checkmate, the other players.

The reasoning is sound to me: let's say you're in a 4-player game with players A, B, C, and D (you're A). You crush players B and C, and checkmate them, while in the meantime D plays very conservatively, taking his time to lock his king up behind a fianchetto, forming defensive battlements with his pawns, and finally, while all the fireworks are going on elsewhere on the board, he just shuffles his rooks back and forth on his back rank. By the time you have finished off B and C, you, A, have 60 points (40 for the checkmates plus another 20 for captured pieces and checks and so forth), B has 15 points, C has 23 points, and D has...zero. Your army is about as decimated as you might expect after taking down two opponents. It would make for a very ugly game for D to then be rewarded for this style of play with an easy win over your depleted forces! So instead of letting D have that easy win, the game lets you simply quit while you are ahead. The fact that D must stay within 20 points of whoever the point leader is gives him a strong incentive to abandon the most conservative elements of his play.

One other note - not only can you sometimes win by resigning, there are also some 4-player games where you can blunder by checkmating! I just played a bizarre ending where my opponent evidently didn't quite understand the scoring system. By the end of the game, the score was 56-37; I was up by 19 points but hugely down in material, and staring at an unavoidable mate-in-1. Since resigning would give my opponent 20 points and the win, I had nothing to lose by taking my opponent's pawn with my queen, even though the pawn was guarded by other pieces. My opponent should have just captured my queen (9 points) and then mated me in the next move or two (20 points). Instead, he went for the immediate mate. Because he didn't grab the free 9 points, we both finished with 57 points and the game ended in a draw!

We're talking about four player chess. There are no "real rules".

yes

Yes there are real rules. Check out the board game of Chess 4. Same number of pieces and same number of squares on the board. Nowhere does it state this resigning stuff where you can win by resigning...