Comments by Uri Bruck

When names move from one language to another, then articles like the
definite article sometimes just stick to them. I've seen quite a few place
names in the south of Spain, for instance, that have names beginign with
'Al-', obviously the Arabic definite article.
'Alfil' is the name the piece acquired in Europe. The fact that the text
mentions it is good enough.
The Arabic 'fil' is also related to the Hebrew 'pil', which can be found
in the Mishna, dating back to the first couple of centuries C.E., and
which the Even-Shoshan Hebrew dictionary traces back to teh Akkadian
'pilu'.
The chess piece was obviously named for the Arabic word.

Hello Dan,
First, thank you for taking the time to do the Zillions implementation.
I'll start with your first question:
'It seems to me that if the
second King can be checkmated, it can never be captured.  Are there
circumstances in which the remaining King can be captured?'

If a single king is checkmated, it means that there is no legal move to
take it out of check, however 'The king is the standard chess king, with
the exception that it may be moved into check, and it may be captured.'
It's ok for the checkmated player to make another move that will leave the
king in check, and then the king will be captured on the next turn.

At first it might not seem to make sense to allow a king to move into
check, and if you have just one left, it doesn't. Even if you have both of
them it's still not a great move, unless it happens to be a winning move -
a move that checkmates the other player. With two kings vs. one, the
situation could arise.
So capturing one king and checkmating the other is really the same as
capturing both kings, checkmating the second just means the second capture
is inevitable. If it's easy to code this, fine, if not, then that's fine
too, because it amounts to the same thing.

As for the third win condition, I haven't done any Zillions programming,
although I've read the manual and some code. Without seeing the code it's
difficult to answer. Perhaps the best answer I can give is that I prefer
people to playtest the game as it was submitted, but if you think it would
impact the AI, you can implement it one way, and then add the other
implementation as a variant. Then even if the AI in the 'official' version
is weakened, people can still playtest that version playing one another
on-line.

Hi,
For rules written by Anderw Bartmess, same person who wrote them for the
Poster Book, look here:
http://www.grigor.org/startrek.htm