Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Oct 5, 2008 03:30 PM UTC:Well, I am not very happy either about the renaming of quite common pieces in Superchess. But when in Rome, one does like the Romans... The use of the [] came more or less automatic, as I started defining Superchess in WinBoard as a form of Crazyhouse. I am not entirely happy with that either, as the 'holdings' here have a different meaning than in Crazyhouse (promotion pieces in stead of drop pieces). OTOH, and this we discussed before, I am skeptical about your desire to be able to encode the rules of the game in the FEN. Even requiring that each piece has a unique letter, which is universally valid over all variants, is doomed: as John remarked below, there are more pieces than letters. So whatever system you devised, it would necessarily be limited to a subset of the variants. While other variants would still need FENs. For the sub-variant of Superchess played at the Dutch Championship, it would be feasible to unify it with Capablanca-type variants. If you want a FEN format which uniquely specifies the variant, which is usable over a wide range of variants, I think you should build in a way to specify exotic pieces (for which no standard letter exists). What I would do is to allow replacement of a single piece letter by a description of the piece in parentheses. E.g. in stead of G for Giant/Amazon you could use (QN). So you would get FENs like: 3k4/6(QN)1/8/8/8/8/8/3KN w - - 0 1 Then you would only need a fairly limited set of move-descriptor letters for use within the parentheses. You could use B,R,Q to indicate sliders (where Q would be shorthand for RB), and the Betza system ( http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/betzanot.html ) built on F, W, A, D, N, H, L, J, G for leapers. Repetition of a leaper symbol would indicate a slider with that step (i.e. (NN) would be Nightrider, B would be shorthand for (FF)). For compactness, you could allow definition of shorthand letters within the FEN: (NN=H) would mean that subsequent H or h (without parentheses) would indicate white and black Nightriders, respectively. This would be especially important for Pawns, of which there usually are a lot. And promotion rules are a property of a Pawn, so Pawns with non-standard promotion rules would need to be described. A Pawn that could promote only to Ferz (like in Shatranj) could be designated as (P:F). I would use an explicit negation character for excluding pieces, like (P:!C) in Janus. And of course define a shorthand letter for it, as there are likely to be many Pawns in most Janus positions, (P:!C=P), so all subsequent Pawns would be simply P or p. (P:*) could mean promotable to every captured piece. Superchess positions would allow promotion to some pieces that were replaced in the prelude as well as to captured pieces, which could be written as (P:*qbbn=P), where lower-case indicates the piece is in finite supply. Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID NextChess does not match any item.