Comments by nelk114

At a first couple glances, this looks nice!

It's nice to see the Ship back again after you took it out of your mainline larger games, and ofc the snake fits logically with it. The Cheetah (aka the Beaver for those who are into Gilman) is nice too (and much rarer than the squirrel) and the Sabre‐tooth I've never seen before — it's kinda terrifying!

A couple of notes: afaik the name snaketongue (whence iirc your shortened snake) goes back to Betza's Bent Riders article — which also mentions the ship (under the name twin tower — arguably in bad taste but acknowledged as such in the original version; I think Greg accidentally(?) removed that when he added his own footnotes).

And regarding your question at the beginning, one argument for even ranks is that otherwise a pawn reaching the middle rank has an advantage over its counterpart that can't be trivially made up for. Idk if i've seen it said this way round (maybe in the comments on H.G.'s Elven Chess) but certainly there was a proposal by Rich Hutnik that on boards with odd ranks the pawn should be able to capture straight forwards to balance that advantage (by discouraging a move to the middle rank). Ofc that hasn't stopped people, and it may well matter less than it was made out to. And indeed (other than a kind of symmetry) there's nothing in particular to suggest any advantage for even files.

It's still not clear what this means. A withdrawer captures by making a move, whilst an immobiliser stops others from making moves — the former's effect is on its own turn while the latter's is on the opponent's.

As such there's a couple of interpretations possible:

• It stops things from moving away like a withdrawer. This is just a weaker immobiliser, and is already attested in Euqorab
• It petrifies pieces that it moves away from rather than capturing them. Then the question is whether and if so when pieces can come back into play: never (as with Nemoroth's basilisk)? When the withdrawing‐petrifier moves again (leaving it able to only petrify one piece at a time)? After a larger but still fixed number of moves (turn counting, ugh)? Under some other condition? Are involuntary moves (from Swappers, shepherding pieces, Go Away!s, ⁊c.) counted? Does capturing it release pieces?

Imo the former option is not very interesting, nor necessarily well‐defined (how does it deal with knights?), while the latter is quite complex in principle and perhaps not very immobiliser‐like — though I admit the possibility of ulima‐style pieces with effects besides capture is interesting and not very well explored

I think you've asked a similar question before, and the answer (including re this case) is further down this comment thread ;)

I also have a question of my own: just to clarify, a Dark Spirit or Buddhist Spirit capturing a Deva or Teaching King, or vice versa, causes it, like other pieces, to convert to its victim? The notes clarify that, as expected, one of them would disappear, but don't make clear which one, and one could make a case imo for contageous pieces being immune to contageon themselves.

You mean how could it be described? With the new E atom it should be simple enough to do exactly one reflection: [B-E-sB] (a slight change from the regular refl. B in HG's comment) For arbitrarily many, but at least one, I think we still need the off‑board interpretation of o as the [] notation lacks arbitrary repetitions afaict. That would give something like yafoabyas(yafoabyas)B (though the sandbox seems to ignore the brackets on the second one, only allowing either one or two reflections… probably I'm doing sth wrong)

Three obvious potential improvements stand out, besides the aforementioned grammatical issues:

• The setup diagram is misleading; even though you clarify that the fore‐ and hindmost ranks are not actually part of the board, it's probably better to make that clear in the diagram too
• Similarly, using pieces to denote destination squares in the movement diagrams is extremely(!) confusing. The diagram designer does provide for using coloured circles for this purpose; consider finding out how to use that functionality
• The drop rule is not clear. You say that cannons and two soldiers start in hand and may be dropped only on resp^ly the 1^st or 3^rd rank, but even this information is easily missed and further details (is it Shōgi‐style drops? Seirawan‐style? Sth else entirely?) are completely unspecified. I'd suggest putting a note about it in the Rules section

Also a typo: your paragraph about the Soldier refers to droppable pawns.

This one?: https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=33008

I happened to be reading this thread recently so it's still freshish in my memory

I think (Siwakorn may feel free, of course, to correct me) that it means that once no more unpromoted Soldiers remain, if 64 moves pass without any captures the game is declared a draw, but a capture, rather than resetting the count, adds 16 instead.

Also I understood the Grand Continent bit to mean “Continental Chess is played widely on the Grand Continent, which is the one supercontinent of a fictional world.” [changes emphasised]

Speaking of both names and M&B, worth noting that Paulowich's Spotted Gryphon is called an Angel there, and Gilman's Nightingale is close to your F-then-W-then-DD piece, though it cannot stop on the F square (and thus makes exactly an even number of steps). The Chainsaw (and a whole class of related pieces) remains unnamed.

The classic answer was to hold a Design contest (the obvious themes in this case being Silver and/or the nr 25), but I'm not sure if we have enough people active here aþm for that to really work — istr the 2017 20th‌‐anniversary one never really went anywhere (though I suppose one could always try recruiting from other Variant fora…).

That said, a tournament would work too. Featuring games from throughout the pages' tenure…

I think what may have happened here is the same thing that seems to have happened in a number of places around the site: at some point, a bunch of files written in UTF-8 were interpreted bytewise as what I assume is Latin-1. That also explains a number of other strange things that turn up (Ben notes that several pages have e.g. ⟨²⟩ where ⟨²⟩ is expected, and some old comments (e.g.) refer to Jörg as ⟨Jörg⟩).

I note that that transformation (and, indeed the reverse) would leave ASCII characters intact, as the backup version has (hence intact links ⁊c.) but this attempt to fix it has not (hence the broken URLs spilt around and partial names (⟨盓ric van Reem⟩) ⁊c.)

EDIT: Playing about with it, it looks like it is indeed one of the 8‐bit encodings, though the ⟨€⟩ sign suggests it's not Latin-1 but one of the others. The character between “Shuffle Chess” and “Prechess” would seem to suggest it's one where ⟨€⟩ is 0x80, as that gives a ⟨、⟩, which would make sense there (it's a punctuation used to separate items in a list) — of those, Codepage 1252 (Microsoft Windows Western European) was once quite popular iirc, so it seems a likely candidate.

EDIT 2: The backup page contains the characters Z–caron ⟨Ž⟩, S–caron ⟨Š⟩, and the O–E ligature ⟨Œ⟩; of the charsets on the linked page, codepage 1252 is the only one to contain all three of those characters, so my money is on that being the right one. As such, presumably the procedure would be to save it encoded in codepage 1252 and then open it as a UTF-8 file.

EDIT 3: A quick try at doing this with Libreoffice tells me I'm right — my Chinese isn't very good but it's enough to see that it looks plausible — the notes section for example begins with a section on how to play it on one's computer (matching the Zillions file link). Unfortunately Libreoffice still leaves a couple of things garbled: it refuses to accept bytes like 0x81 (which is unassigned in codepage 1252), rather than pass them through, which in turn leaves any character encoded using it (including the aforementioned list comma ⟨、⟩) unrecovered. A correct recovery would thus need to use software which is a bit more liberal in what it accepts/emits.

The link in the introduction is broken; it should probably point to the author's translation of the Chaturanga page — note that the latter, as well as the Courier Chess page still need converting (the Shogi page oþoh seems intact — it was last edited in 2018 though so perhaps it escaped the corruption). Also is there an old backup of the Chinese page on FIDE? As it stands now it's complete nonsense. EDIT: The Wayback Machine has a copy (and the garbled version seems to have the same update stamp so it probably hadn't changed in the 14 years before conversion to its current state)

I don't see anything wrong with having pages in multiple languages here, and we do indeed have some pages in Spanish, among others. The Alphabetical Index issues queries for English pages only by default, but you can query for non‐English pages too — apparently there's only(!) 108 of them so there's no difficulty getting them to display. Though in any case the Index lacks pages for “Pages beginning with ⟨菲⟩”, for example…

I see at the bottom of that page a note saying that it was translated by Altavista's Babelfish. We should probably get rid of it,

The note does also say that one “Cherry X.Z.”, who even had an email address linked in Wayback's copy, ‘modified’ it, which may mean it has had some human input to make it sensible Chinese. But my own Chinese isn't good enough to judge the correctness/idiomaticness(?) of the original page, so I can't weigh in on it from that perspective. I'm happy to leave that up to Editorial Discretion

Having just read the book, this description is erroneous. Morley does propose the first variant givn on this page, but it is an alternative proposal, offered almost reluctantly after a digression on Knight's Tours, to the one the book is ‘about’ (though in many ways it's really a long and winding — though charming — book of Chess‐variant apologetics); the main variant in the book has only the ‘corridors’ on the sides, not the ones behind the camps. The second version offered here would seem to be apocryphal.

The corridors originate, according to Morley, as a way of giving the Rooks' pawns the ability of capturing in both directions, as the other 6 pawns can. The promotion rule is, as suggested here, that pawns can promote on the enemy back rank — pawns are given the opportunity to capture into the corridor ‘at their own risk’.

The variant as a whole is intended to expand the possibilities of the game (and counteract its being ‘played out’ — not so much between players of equal strength, as between players of potentially equal intuitive ability but differing levels of learnedness, esp. re the Opening) without making any changes to the rules or pieces, in contrast to e.g. Henry Bird's earlier proposal (referred to in the text) which introduces the Carrera compounds, as the added complexity would in his opinion be, though perhaps interesting to experts, too intimidating for lay chessplayers.

As a change, the ‘inverse Gustavian’ board (i.e. adding everything except the corners on each side) is a nice way of accomplishing that goal imo (and indeed, the Gustavian board has the opposite goal: introducing new pieces while changing the board as little as possible).

Speaking of 404's, I also get those from the What's New page, specifically the two newest links (Cubic Chess and 3D Chess 4 Cubed). Though they also have the External Link icon next to the name, so perhaps that's related.

The Google Custom Search turns up this when searching for ‘ski‐rook’: https://www.chessvariants.com/other.dir/abc-chess.html

Apparently it contains a (leaping) ski‐bishop, though no actual ski‐rook. Only one I could find though. EDIT: Never mind, apparently it's just an example. And all the other usages of ski‐sliders or Pickets (and their compounds) seem to be lame. Which leaves only a game which I've had in mind but not yet got round to writing up, where a leaping‐picket+wazir promotes from a Phoenix/Waffle. And arguably (albeit failing the ‘straight line’ condition) the original GA unicorn/rhinoceros

I must admit I'm surprised these aren't more popular…

Besides the points made about your other submission, some of which apply here too, I have one further main question about this: What exactly is a ‘connection’? The mention of ‘support’ in the rules section suggests that it means being defended by a friendly piece (and the diagrams seem to support this), but it could be stated more clearly.

Also a minor question: are Kings excluded from providing ‘connections’ (as they are excluded from the effects of your other game), or is it just the own‐side pawns?