A piece-set like this would be great for starting chess, and variants. Especially when there are a lot of pieces and different promotions.
I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
201–210 of 269 posts
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I've gotten so used to 2D knights that it annoys me when people face them forward on a 3D board.
There are flat chess pieces that have the traditional 2D symbols on top. Another question is whether anyone makes 3D knight pieces that are designed to lay flat on the board. Such pieces would fit a "Godfather" themed chess set rather well...
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chess would be a more elegant game without the stalemate rule. (And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot. So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves,…
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…
Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check.
I was not talking about the rule that handles games that do not progress. (Though I would perhaps replace that rule with one that just forbids repeating board states, but that was besides the point here.)
So to make chess more elegant in how the rules are formulated (but probably not a better game, mind you), I would suggest removing all special rules around check and checkmate. Just replace it with the rule that you lose when your king gets captured (and obviously, keep Zugzwang).
Sorry, I was not clear that I also wanted to remove special handling of check and checkmate.
(Btw, this feels very similar to the rules against self-sacrifice in Go.)
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#204This idea is common in Shogi piece designs for those who can't read the traditional Kanji designs.
And the idea is misguided there as well. Kanji are problematic because people who can't read them can't differentiate their shapes. Any unique silhouette -- even a Latin letter -- is preferable to arrow diagrams, which end up unnecessarily similar to one another.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
What do you mean the game keeps on going? One side has to move but has no legal moves. 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 somethi…
> What do you mean the game keeps on going? One side has to move but has no legal moves.
As said elsewhere, I would suggest removing rules against putting yourself in check.
> 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]
That's why I was careful in saying that the proposed change would make the rules more elegant, less clunky. I did not say anything about this making chess a better game. Sometimes adding weird corner cases to your rules can make the game better.
Just look at all the weird rules that you can find in Skat or Doppelkopf. (Though Mü is an example of a game with much cleaner rules that captures a similar spirit.)
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
What do you mean the game keeps on going? One side has to move but has no legal moves. 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 somethi…
I do not get this Rosen Trap example you linked to... It's an easy win for blacks, just move the rook to 8th row instead of moving the pawn and it's checkmate. The pawn move seems kind of random, as if it was played by a child.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#207[deleted]
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#208For 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.
Try playing a game where your opponents knights are replaced with queens. I suspect you will change your mind very quickly.
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't represent the "en passant" rule, nor the castling. :-)
Nor the "promotion" of a pawn that has marched across the board to begin a new life as... a pawn (or anything else that isn't a king -- this almost means a queen, but a promotion to knight can also be useful). Displaying usual the moves on the pieces is certainly super-handy for beginners to understand the moves, but as you've pointed out: Chess also has other nuances. --- I was showing off one night and, at the tail…
> and promoted a pawn to a pawn
umm. Commendably warped, but I'm not sure that's legal?
(BTW many years ago I experimented creating chess variants, before I even knew it was a thing. I invented a number which all felt contrived, but one actually felt right and an improvement, which is the ability to take your own pieces, as well as the enemy's. Turns out that somebody's already invented it (search for 'self eliminator chess') and they considered it to have potential. The value of it was it allows you to trade off position for pieces. It really changed how the game felt for the better. FYI anyway, YMMV)
Re: I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack directions
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Sometimes it's tactically crucial that the promotion is a check, and in these cases you might need a knight.
Making a knight to avoid stalemate is actually extremely rare, because very often a knight isn't enough to win. Making a rook is more common there, but even that's rare.