A Game Courier Preset for Lions and Unicorns Chess

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Lions and Unicorns Chess

Includes automation or rule enforcement.
No display of legal moves.
No evaluation of endgame conditions.

Welcome to Game Courier, where you can play Lions and Unicorns Chess and many other Chess variants through online correspondence.

Rules of Lions and Unicorns Chess

King

Queen

Unicorn

Chancellor

Lion

Rook

Bishop

Knight

Pawn

With exceptions noted below, all usual Chess pieces are the same as in Chess. Additional pieces are described below.

King	The King moves as the King in Chess. It castles by moving two spaces toward the Rook, with the Rook moving to the space the King passed over. The usual castling restrictions from Chess apply.
Unicorn	The Unicorn moves as a Bishop or a Nightrider. A Nightrider can make consecutive Knight moves in the same direction, until it makes a capture, is blocked by another of the player's own pieces, or has gone as far as the board will let it. The Nightrider move can be blocked only on the spaces it would land on with a Knight move. Any of its Knight moves can leap over pieces as a Knight would.
Chancellor	The Chancellor moves as a Knight or a Rook.
Lion	The Lion is Ralph Betza's "Half-Duck" (HFD, a piece that can move one square diagonally or jump two or three squares orthogonally), from the Remarkable Rookies army.
Pawn	Any Pawn may make a double move from the square it started on. Whenever a double move take a Pawn to a space horizontally adjacent to an enemy Pawn, the enemy Pawn may take it by en passant on the next turn. On reaching the last rank, a Pawn promotes to a Chancellor, Queen, or Unicorn, but not to any lesser piece.

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 Alfaerie settings file for Lions and Unicorns Chess, which was made by Greg Strong.

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

Game Courier, Copyright © Fergus Duniho, 2001-2017