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Somehow this reminded me of a football variant (soccer for americans) that has two balls in play, either ball is good as the other.
I wondered about this recently and assumed one reason this sort of thing doesn't catch on for mainstream sports like football (soccer) or basketball is because it'd be a mess to spectate/broadcast. Sounds fun though!
I'm reminded of most proposals to defang Lisp of its parentheses.
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Fun idea, but what happens when a player submits an illegal move that becomes legal only when taking the opponents move into account or that’s only legal before the opponent’s move? Say a rook moving from a1 to a3 while an opponent’s knight moves from or into a2? Also, if you are going to write down moves, you can allow the players to move all of their pieces, too, like in Diplomacy. A queen could capture a pawn next…
I think I would specify that a move has to be legal when at the start of the move, i.e. while it is being written down.
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I think I would specify that a move has to be legal when at the start of the move, i.e. while it is being written down.
Or alternatively, the piece doesn't move if the move turns out to be illegal? Would have to try both options to see which works better
Promotions are a big part of shogi, and part of what makes it fun. You do not start with the most powerful pieces, you have to earn them through promotions. Also, the promotion area (the enemy camp) is larger. This article doesn't capture that aspect of the game... which is necessary if you are looking for an ideal chess variant. You may also want to take a look at some mechanics of Xiangqi, another chess variant.
If you want to have fun playing with chess variants, check out Really Bad Chess[0], it's a random variation each day that you play against AI and rank yourself against other players. [0] http://reallybadchess.com/
That said, Really Bad Chess isn't really a chess variant. It's just orthodox chess with a semi-randomized board layout, but it changes none of the core mechanics, and all the pieces are the same as orthodox chess
Perhaps a variant can be devised which causes a dice roll at the time of each capture. The attacker needs to roll more than the number of direct supports a piece is having to take it, otherwise they lose the attacking piece. It will be a bit like XCOM, before a move one will know the percentage of success of various captures, and will have to make a decision in that light. So even a higly probable capture has a small…
I’ve been wondering if there is a way to change chess so that AI is no longer the obvious winner. Chess itself went through a variety of rule changes throughout its history, so this wouldn’t be completely novel. Off the top of my head - somehow creating new rules, especially socially-dependent or open-ended ones, on demand might work. I asked a similar question a few months ago and got some interesting answers: https…
Now that we are in the age of AlphaZero, I think we are close to the bottom of the barrel of ways to design games to hinder AI. I would be surprised if I saw another pure abstract strategy game that favored humans over AI these days, the way Go and Arimaa used to.
So an entire blog post on a game he hasn't tried yet? That's in the spirit of cooking blog posts where the author has cooked the dish once. I'm reminded of most proposals to defang Lisp of its parentheses.
That being said, I do suspect that these rules are probably pretty close to achieving the effect I wanted to achieve- the main doubt I have is whether the king's moves work, or if they need to be adjusted to get the balance right, but even there, there's a good chance that it works. I will make sure to update the article when I get a chance to test it out.
Some time ago I also had the idea of procedurally generated games, not only of chess, but using basically all the known rule sets and pieces of all known games. I captured a lot of game details and have them stored away, but I had to move onto something else shortly after, so I never explored it further.
The resulting game, Yavalath, is well-known in the abstract strategy game community: https://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/2814/yavalath-evolutionar...