181–190 of 269 posts
That is very clever! But I hate the way the pawns face. Makes sense! But it still reads, to me, like one of those "color, but the text is in a different color" things. Feels like the pawns should be facing the opposite direction. =/
It is very clever, except accidental rotation can easily turn rooks into bishops and vice-versa.
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If you're ever going to get the point where you recognize tactics (or anything, for that matter) on the board, how the pieces move must already be internalized and not require any thought. People even especially practice visualizing knight journeys between arbitrary squares to make this more automatic. If you ask an experienced player to use a weird piece set, you will only be introducing error and cognitive overhead…
Exactly this. Relatives have been trying to choose "fancy-looking" chess sets for me as a gift, and I always hated them. I don't want fancy pieces, I want the standard ones that don't give me cognitive overhead :-). "Tournament chessboards" are my favourites, obviously.
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This is why in some rare endgames you might want to promote to a knight instead of a queen to avoid a stalemate!
I dont get it. Queen can do everything a knight can, and then some. How can electing a knight instead of queen can be of any usefulness? Or do you mean it avoids stalemate by making it harder for the elector to defend/attack, and loose? I dont see any advantage there, isnt stalemate always preffered to loosing?
This would be awesome for teaching beginners. I'd probably go with circle for the king, and maybe an L or a sideways H for the knight, even though they break the original design rule. Otherwise K/Q/N just look too similar.
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Extremely strong disagree with this[1], and the obvious question that arises is what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? Would the other side win? Would the stalemated side pass? Neither seems at all satisfactory. The non-castling variant was invented by Vladimir Kramnik[2] explored by Deep Mind not on a whim but specifically as part of Vlad's exploration of whether this chess var…
> what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? The game keeps going until one side gets too tired and gives up (or makes a mistake that breaks the stalemate). Another idea would be a "Fortnite rule": after $X turns, the outermost edge of the board kills any pieces left in it (or becomes "the storm" in Fortnite parlance); repeat every $X turns until someone's forced into checkmate beca…
That's what I was asking - do they get to "pass" and the other side gets to move? This is how it works in the game of go for instance. In chess that would be more or less equivalent to the non-stalemated player winning, because in many stalemate positions if you had an extra move you could checkmate.
The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so much so that he now has a particular type of stalemate trap named after him.[2]
I'm not seriously entertaining your Fortnite rule. That is such a radical departure from the game of chess as not to be the same at all, so you could have that as a chess variant or whatever but it's fundamentally a different game.
[1] https://youtu.be/YB_LLivPlY8?si=dWl2bEAEeRmzhBiC
[2] Defending king in the corner with the opposing queen a knight's move away and no other legal moves for the defender. https://www.chess.com/forum/view/game-analysis/the-rosen-tra...
I kind of wish the knight was more of a tetris L, but I like the idea overall
For me the most surprising observation from this thread is this tweet [1] showing that the knight's moves are exactly the squares that the queen can't get to within a 2 square manhattan distance. I.e. the knight is an anti-queen. [1]: https://twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/1750285122769957129
I'm not a master or anything, but I've always found it interesting that the queen is usually thought of as the most powerful piece while I think it's the knight. Yeah the queen can move everywhere, but she's "predictable". The way a knight moves makes it more difficult to defend against IMO.
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Extremely strong disagree with this[1], and the obvious question that arises is what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? Would the other side win? Would the stalemated side pass? Neither seems at all satisfactory. The non-castling variant was invented by Vladimir Kramnik[2] explored by Deep Mind not on a whim but specifically as part of Vlad's exploration of whether this chess var…
> what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? The game keeps going until one side gets too tired and gives up (or makes a mistake that breaks the stalemate). Another idea would be a "Fortnite rule": after $X turns, the outermost edge of the board kills any pieces left in it (or becomes "the storm" in Fortnite parlance); repeat every $X turns until someone's forced into checkmate beca…
I think this is fun, but (a) knights' threats are disconnected and this "flower" approach while good is maybe not ideal. You might as well use a hollow circle at that point. (b) when we say "chess pieces can be redesigned to be..." then I think about actual physical pieces, it would not do to make these as actual physical pieces because an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa. Gotta make t…
A swastika shape would make sense for the knight. I guess there is still a cultural aversion to its use, however.
I thought this would be about redesigning their movement to make a new kind of game. But it's only the shape of the pieces. That said, I'd use a square for the rooks so they don't get confused with the bishops as they get moved and maybe an L shape for the knights. It would definitely make it easy for beginners to learn how each piece moves.