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Comments by Daniel Roth

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Fidchell. A large Great Chess variant with blended historical elements, invented for an RPG. (12x12, Cells: 144) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Thu, Dec 5, 2002 03:23 PM UTC:
This sounds a great game to me but I have a question:
The rules states that a check mate in the traditional way is a loss, how
can then a player lose his king without losing the game? It would be nice
to have some examples.

Yours D. Roth

Ryu Shogi. Large modern shogi variant. (7x12, Cells: 84) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Dec 10, 2002 10:26 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Nice game but one question.
How does the promoted pieces move around? I assume that they are moving
the same way as the third rank pieces it presented before it is promoted.

Yours D. Roth

Ryu Shogi ZIP file. Large modern shogi variant.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Dec 31, 2002 08:59 AM UTC:
Nice game! :) But I found a bug in the zrf file. I was able to take the King and the game did not recognized that. The result was I had to take all pieces from the opponent to win!

Pocket Mutation Chess. Take one of your pieces off the board, maybe change it, keep it in reserve, and drop it on the board later. (8x8, Cells: 64) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Fri, May 9, 2003 06:03 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
This is an excellent game! The pocket allows for many surprises.
I played its zrf many times and I found a very small error in it. The
piece CancellorRider is missing its one step diagonal move.

Turkish Great Chess III. John Gollon's third of six variations on Great Chess. (12x12, Cells: 144) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Thu, Jun 5, 2003 09:08 PM UTC:
The strange thing I don't like well on this variant are two time two
different looking pieces with the same moves. The Elephant and the
Standard are the same as like the Rook and the Chariot are the same.
Additionally are the pawns on the C and on the J file completely
unprotected. To improve this game I would give the Chariot the ability to
step 1 square diagonally like a ferz. This will protect these pawns I
mentioned above. And the Standard would gains the ability to step 1 square
orthagonally like a wazir.
The new Standard equals to Horse in Shogi.
The new Chariot equals to Dragon in Shogi.

L. The list of official nominations for the variant-by-committee.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Sun, Jul 13, 2003 11:16 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
There seems to be some troubles with the Towers around.
Some solutions I can provide:
1st limit numbers of towers per player to 4. A pawn can not promote to a
tower piece if there are already 4 towers for that player around.
2nd can a tower split and merge with another tower as one move.
3rd pawns promotes only to 1 piece towers.
4th limit tower heights to 8

Magna Carta Chess. Black has the FIDE array, White has a Marshal and an Archbishop instead of a Queen and King. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Sep 30, 2003 09:39 AM UTC:Good ★★★★
A much better way to balance it is to add N to the black king.

This result in white RN + BN vs black RB + KN

Daniel Roth wrote on Sat, Oct 4, 2003 05:05 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
To 1 and 2: These versions are nearly similar but: The version 1 makes
black still stronger than white. The version 2 is clearly weaker than
version 1 in the case the Goldrider is no defensive piece. If white plays
well he will get behind the Goldrider and then it is much easier to win
for white.

To 3: This variant looks much better for me but there are still issues in
the case if black pawns can be promoted to Viceace or not. If they can
then it would get very easy for black to win. If they can not then black
have lesser useage of the pawn promotions and this counts for promotions
into king too.

To 4: This sounds the best way. Add knight move to the king and make both
retain and be promotable from pawns.

Home page of The Chess Variant Pages. Homepage of The Chess Variant Pages.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Thu, Jan 8, 2004 11:49 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Excellent site with one exception!
I miss the ability to search for variants using parts of terms.
Ex: I'm looking for the 'Crazyhouse' variant but I'm only knowing that
the variant contains the term 'house'. Actually I can not search that
way.
It would be nice to have a search function included which can search for
variant names or parts of these or to search contents of this site.

Mortal Shogi ZRFs ZIP file. Play Shogi and a couple variants with diminishing pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Mon, Jun 14, 2004 09:14 AM UTC:
I found out that the bmp format here can not be readed well under Win XP.

After simply opening and resaving the images with Irfanview the games are
running well. BTW I noticed after resaving the images was becoming smaller
in file size with the exception of the board.

Viking Chess Set. Game board and pieces in search of rules. (Cells: 37) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Wed, May 18, 2005 09:27 AM UTC:
Can you deliver the original name of this chess game if possible.
There are too many 'Viking Chesses' around.

Jupiter. Huge chess variant on 16 by 16 board. (16x16, Cells: 256) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Jul 5, 2005 05:36 PM UTC:
There are still several pieces missing their moving/taking rules.
Will this be fixed soon?

Stanley Random Chess A game information page
. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Sep 27, 2005 09:47 PM UTC:Poor ★
I looked at the mao game and I think that one will be easier to catch than
SRC. Just curious how will the cheating be prevented in such games.

I consider that SRC can not be learned by playing at all.
Else it needs some consistency which does not exist in SRC.
For example white moves 1st d2-d4 does not work every time. How will a SRC
grand master see that in advance? And playing of someone who knows all
rules against someone who does not is quite unfair. At least someone who
knows the rules should says this in advance of a game of SRC. Then the
player not knowing the rules can at least try to learn them.
And another thing is the complete lack of example SRC games.

Another thing is how the client works at www.schemingmind.com.
If a player makes a move, which is illegal in the case of the SRC rule
set, it makes a random move from all available legal moves.

Two players playing SRC who don't know the rules is very funny.

The other game (MC) is just a nonsense. How can someone keep a '125
volume' ruleset in the mind? And what is the playing material for that
game?

Storm the Ivory Tower. A Smess adaptation of Chinese Chess. (9x10, Cells: 90) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Thu, Dec 15, 2005 05:56 PM UTC:
Where is this so called 'unuseable' board from Michael Howe? I would like to have a look at it before I will comment anything.

Herichess. A variant on a board in the shape of the English Heritage logo. (14x14, Cells: 112) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Dec 20, 2005 01:57 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
Nice interesting game. But I would change the board a little bit.
Take the empty super squares on the outer side of the lanes and put them
inside of them. Then add a blue super square to fill the cap between the 4
moved super squares. The result is a cross inside of a big sharp (#) sign.
The super square rule prevents directly diagonal moves through the center
cross.

For lettering: Why not just use standard chess lettering (A-N and 1-14)?

Shatranjian Shogi. Shatranj with extra pieces from days gone by and with Shogi drops. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Tue, Aug 1, 2006 10:07 AM UTC:Good ★★★★
Nice game which offset the weakness of the old pieces quite well.
But I see the lack of a long range diagonal moving piece like a bishop.
What's about adding pawn promotion to bishop also?

10x10 game with some popular pieces. Missing description (10x10, Cells: 104) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Fri, Aug 20, 2010 04:40 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
Nice game but one thing is very confusing to me: Why to promote a pawn to an opponent (!) silver or gold when you can promote the pawns to everything else which is most time better anyway? A different idea is, tht when a pawn is promoted to one of the 2 generals it can then be immediately dropped everywhere on an empty square. This for balancing out a bit that these two pieces are comparable quite weak.

Daniel Roth wrote on Wed, Sep 8, 2010 12:34 PM UTC:
It seems that you did not unterstanded me very well. I wanted to know what is the sense behind the promotion of the pawn to an opponent piece. And as an alternative that the silver or gold are still useful when a pawn is promoted to one of them is not becoming an opponent piece but dropped as own piece on one of the free squares as like in Shogi. Ex: White promotes a pawn to a white silver and then dropping it immediately on one of the empty squares.

The only variance where your system works is when players are only allowed to promote to already taken pieces. If there is none available then they are enforced to promote the pawn into an oponent silver or gold. (imagine a pawn takes an opponent rook on the opponents base line and have then to be promoted to a opponents silver or gold.)

But interesting the idea you had with letting the transformed opponent silver or gold being dropped everywhere and not allowed to move next move. Cen nice be used to block a kings escape way.

Har Meggido Chess. Missing description (15x18, Cells: 270) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Daniel Roth wrote on Wed, Sep 15, 2010 05:36 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
Nice game. I would like to see that as a zrf.
But there are some stuff that needs to be improved.
a) The rule, which forbids two pawns/iron generals to stay in same colums should be removed for moving pawns/iron generals. It should be only valid for dropping pawns. The sense behind this change is that in this variant the pawns can also move diagonally forward. 

b) the promotions should be listed in a separate paragraph. In the current rules the rules about the pawn lining up intersects with the promotions of the pieces.

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