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V. Reinhart wrote on Tue, Jul 18, 2017 01:50 PM UTC:

With the rule changes I think this is now a nearly perfectly designed variant.

Chess is already a very complicated game in the sense of being able to "calculate" moves. Even normal chess cannot be perfectly calculated even if a modern engine had the support of supercomputers.

So in my opinion, it is never necessary to purposelly add rules simply for the sake of "adding complexity" (similar to Greg's comments). The complexity in chess is already inherent in the game itself. (For this same reason, I never add ice cubes to beer, and my coffee is not adulterated with extra flavorings).

This variant now has all the elements of a well-designed game: simple and clean graphics, good mix of traditional and new pieces, rooks placed traditionally at the corners, etc. The pawns also being allowed to make up to an initial quadruple-step, and knights a double-step is also good due to the large board.

Now just two more comments:

1) Nicolino says that pawns can't promote to Star Cat because that would be an overwhelming power increase. Using HGMuller's formula (value = 1.1*N*(30 +(5/8)*N), centipawns) the Star Cat should be worth about 12 points. I don't think that's too much, especially with the large board. But a reason to not allow it might be that the game already starts with 4 Cats and 4 Star-Cats, so promoting to queens or other pieces forces more variety on the board.

2) Also, with the rule clarifications/changes, I believe that Fairy-Max can be setup to play this game (please correct me if I'm wrong). Greg also said that after "play testing" this game in theory could be added to ChessV (a future possibility?) So for the sake of discussion could Fairy-Max be set-up to use one ChessV engine, or vice-versa? If so, an engine-vs-engine game (different codes) might be possible. That would be really interesting, especially for a game that is just barelly within the range of the engines that I'm aware of.

One final minor note: Rule#3 has a typo ("becuase" -> "because").

Good work on the game Nicolino!


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