A Game Courier Preset for Chess with Different Armies

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Chess with Different Armies

Rules enforced. Legal moves displayed.

Welcome to Game Courier, where you can play Chess with Different Armies and many other Chess variants through online correspondence.

Rules of Chess with Different Armies

Chess with Different Armies is played like Chess except that each player may play one of four different armies. These are the usual Chess army, called the Fabulous FIDEs, and three others: the Colorbound Clobberers, the Nutty Knights, and the Remarkable Rookies. Aside from the different armies, there are two main differences from Chess:

• When promoting, a Pawn may promote to any piece that belongs to either player's army.
• The King may castle with any piece that begins in a space normally occupied by a Rook. When it castles Queen-side (Cardinal-side) with a colorbound piece (the Bede in the Colorbound Clobberers), it must move three spaces toward the piece, instead of the usual two, so that the piece stays on the same color.

White's Army	Black's Army
Nutty Knights Charging Rook Moves like a Rook forward and sideways, or moves like a King backwards. Fibnif Moves like a Knight for its two longest forward and backward moves, or a Ferz. Charging Knight Moves like a Knight for its four forward moves, or moves like a king sideways and backwards. Colonel Moves like a Rook forwards or sideways, or a Knight in a knight's four foward moves, or a king.	Colorbound Clobberers Bede Moves as Bishop or Dabbabah (leaping two spaces orthogonally). Waffle Moves as Wazir or Alfil, leaping one space orthogonally or two spaces diagonally. Fad Moves as Ferz, Alfil, or Dabbabah, leaping one space diagonally or two spaces in any direction. Cardinal Moves as Bishop or Knight.

How to Move Pieces

Full Algebraic Notation

Algebraic notation identifies each space by a coordinate that begins with its file label and ends with its rank label. On the Chess board, files go up and down from one player to the other, and ranks go from left to right. In most games, files are represented by letters, and ranks are represented by numbers, but there is no fixed rule requiring this for all games, and some games, such as Shogi, reverse this convention. If you look at the diagram, you will usually see the file labels going from left to right and the file labels going up and down. And if you hover your mouse over a space, you will normally see the name of the coordinate appear in a tooltip.

It is not uncommon to see algebraic notation being used for Chess, but it is often in an abbreviated format that requires you to know both the rules of the game and the current position to know exactly which piece moves where. For example, the notation "Ne6" indicates that a Knight is moving to e6, but it doesn't indicate which Knight, and it doesn't specify where the Knight is coming from. To figure this out, you need to know how a Knight moves and which Knight on the board can make a legal move to e6.

Although rules may be programmed for individual games, Game Courier itself does not know the rules of any game, and it is unable to parse abbreviated algebraic notation. Therefore, it relies on full algebraic notation, which completely specifies the move without requiring any knowledge of the game's rules or the current position. The most usual type of full algebraic notation indicates the piece that is moving by its label, the space it is moving from, and the space it moving to. In Chess, a typical first move might be written as "P e2-e4". When you hover your mouse over a piece, you will normally see the piece label followed by the coordinate for the space, and when you hover it over an empty space, you will normally see the coordinate label. Including the piece label in your notation allows Game Courier to check that the piece you're moving is the right one, and it makes game notation easier to follow, but it is not mandatory.

You may promote a piece by including a promotion move after your regular move. A promotion move has a piece go directly to a coordinate. Here is an example: "p e7-e8; q-e8".

You may remove a piece from a space by adding an @ to the space or by omitting the destination coordinate. For example, both "@-e4" and "e4-" would remove the piece on "e4". This is useful for en passant when you are playing a game that does not handle this automatically. For example, "P d5-e6; e5-" removes the Pawn on e5 after a Pawn moves from d5 to e6.

You will not need to remove spaces for most games, but if you should need to, you can do this by omitting the first coordinate in a move. For example, "-e4" would remove e4 from the board. To add or return a space to the board, you may add an @ or any other piece to it.

Available Pieces

Pieces are represented by labels, usually using uppercase letters for White and lowercase letter for Black. When you enter a move or specify the starting position for a game, you should remember that piece labels are case-sensitive. Many piece sets are available for use with Game Courier, and this table shows you which pieces belong to the piece set you are currently using.

These pieces come from a set containing more pieces, but this preset has had the set of pieces reduced to those used in the game.

Credits

This preset uses the Knights-Colorboundv settings file for Chess with Different Armies, which was made by Vitya Makov.

Game Courier was created, programmed and written by Fergus Duniho.

Game Courier, Copyright © Fergus Duniho, 2001-2017