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Comments by BenGood
84 Spaces Contest. 84 Spaces Contest begins![All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]i might be interested in meeting to play games. i live in pittsburgh, pa, but will probably move nov 1, possibly to the baltimore / dc area and possibly to lancaster, pa.
Multivariant Tournament 2003. 2003 Multivariant PBEM tournament headquarters page.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]i never got to vote in the first round because it said votes were being taken til november first.
Wa Shogi
. A variant of Japanese Chess on an 11 by 11 board. (Link.).[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]this link is not correct, it should be: <P>
http://homepages.ed.ac.uk/rjhare/shogi/wa-shogi/intro.htm
Cube Chess. Chess board is a cube with 4 playable sides, each with a 4x4 grid. (4x(4x4), Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]this looks neat but i have trouble believing that this is more practical than simply playing on a 4x16 board.
Chess Cubic. Chess board is a cube with each side a 4x4 grid. (6x(4x4), Cells: 96) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]also looks impressive. i wonder if this game wouldn't be improved by additional pawns, such as macrochess has. the colored pawn heads a nice touch tho (i had already observed that macrochess would have benefitted from something to that effect). is this game for sale? (yes, i could contact the inventor as is suggested on the page, but it would be easier if such info was put there to begin with.)
Spinal Tap Chess. Variant on an 11x11 board with a once-a-game mass 'Battle Move' of Pawns and Crabs. (11x11, Cells: 121) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]yes, you are correct. the ascii diagram is correct. the graphics diagram is not.
Orphan. Moves like a piece that attacks it.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]actually, the problem is that there should be an orphan on f4. the original diagram had it, but i redid this page this summer, and i obviously left it off by accident. i'll send a new diagram to aronson sometime today.
Regimental Chess . Commercial variant. Groups of pieces can form battalions and regiments and move at the same time. (36x16, Cells: 576) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]the company went down years ago. their webpage - also gone - discussed the game at great length, i printed the whole thing out and it runs more than 30 pages i think. at some point i was in fact planning on scanning all of them so that other people could see them. the problem is that they were printed in black and white, and as you can see from the diagram on this page, color is essential. so somebody (probably not me) would need to figure out what was supposed to be what color and at the color in using paint or photoeditor or whatever. <P>
at any rate, the folder with the printouts is packed away in a box somewhere so it could be awhile before i can find it and get them scanned (i don't own my own scanner either). <P>
the game is quite interesting and play is very complex. a friend of mine contacted the company, which was based in pittsburgh, he wanted to know how they were differentiating the regiments, and they told him colored rubberbands. which means making your own set is probably not too difficult.
Tori Shogi pictures. Pictures of a commercial Tori Shogi set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]nice pics. very useful for those of us who are considering buying from hodges but have never actually seen any of his sets. <P> one thing i'd like to mention here: even when measurements are provided, it's always nice to have a pic of people playing the game, it helps give an idea of size and scale that can be difficult to determine otherwise. yet such pics rarely appear on cv.com photo pages.
Wa Shogi pictures. Photos of a commercial Wa Shogi set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]nice pics, but when i click on them, they only come in 1/4 the size that the pics on the tori shogi photo page do, and they're still blurry. so i'm wondering if this page was set up right. also, it's indexed as a game page, not a photo page.
Chu Shogi pictures. Photos of a commercial Chu Shogi set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Dai Shogi pictures. Photos of a commercial Dai Shogi set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]good pics. will we get pics for for the four bigger shogis also?
New sets of Exchess (Superchess). Announcement of sets of chess variant pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]for anybody who wants to see them, haerington finally has the pics of the new pieces up on his webpage, www.superchess.nl, click on 'available pieces' and scroll down. they look good.
Renniassance Chess 
. Game played on several sizes of large board with 68 pieces per side.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]i'm also glad to finally see a zrf for this game. it is an excellent game, and it is definitely a game that can be taken very seriously. thanks to eholzman for programming it. <P>
(btw glenn, who's mr. jackman?)
Pincer Pawn. Moves as rook, and takes by enclosing.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]i made the original piececlopedia pages for the ultima pieces many years
ago. at the time i was really just trying to take the pieces out of the
context of ultima - with which they are so closely associated - because i
hoped that people might try combining them with other chess and fairy
chess pieces, which indeed they have (altho i don't know that it's
necessarily because of my pages). also, if mr. abbott was accessible via
the internet at that time, i wasn't aware of it - in other words, i didn't
talk to him at all about the game and so i just assumed he had invented
all the pieces. <P>
i'm not familiar with the games jorg mentioned except tafl, but based on
his description of them, none of these games have any historical
connection with chess. so even if abbott is not the inventor of the
pincer pawn's method of capture or the first to use it in a game context,
it seems he is still the first to use it in a chess variant, for whatever
that's worth. <P>
at any rate, several months ago i typed up a list of piece pages i want to
update / redo, and the PP is already on that list, so i'll make sure i
correct the error when i get to it (could be awhile tho).
Double Chess 16 x 8. On 16 by 8 board. (16x8, Cells: 128) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]players of this game who are interested in putting together a nice set may be interested in 'your move chess and games': <P>
http://www.ChessUSA.com <P>
i mention it because to play doublechess, you need two sets plus one extra queen per side, and if you click on their 'what's new' link, they are now selling 'extra queens' for a variety of their sets. so this enables you to buy two sets plus extra queens, which may be a more attractive option for some people instead of buying 3 sets. of course, you still need to come up with a 16x8 board. <P>
Tandem-84 . Variant on two boards of 7 by 6 rows with pieces moving between boards.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]it appears that castling works for the white pieces but not for the black pieces, this neeeds to be fixed. <P>
of less importance, but something that i've never seen before - and possibly something that can't be fixed given the nature of the game - is that if you artificially add or remove pieces in the middle the game, zillions gets confused and doesn't allow any pieces to be moved.
Tenjiku Shogi pictures. Photos of a commercial Tenjiku Shogi set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Courrier Chess . A large historic variant from Medieval Europe.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]i can't get this to run, zillions is searching for the board bmp, courierboard2.bmp or something, and it can't find it. <P> i'm also not sure i understand why this unzips the way it does. noramlly when i unzip zillions stuff, i tell winzip to unzip it to the zillions/rules folder, and either a) the zrf appears right in the folder, or b) it creates a subfolder that has the zrf, but that subfolder is given the same name as the game, so i can find it easily. in the case of courier however, it creates - inside the rules folder - a folder called 'programs' and then a 'zillions of games folder' and then another 'rules' and 'images' folder. btw, it couldn't find the board whether i left the zrf in this folder or if i dragged it to the main 'rules' folder.
Xiangqi: Chinese Chess. Links and rules for Xiangqi (Chinese Chess). (9x10, Cells: 90) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]a good place to play xiangqi by email is on richard's play-by-email server, all you need is an email account and it's free, and you should always be able to find opponents. <P>
http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/
Tamerlan Chess . A well-known historic large variant of Shatranj.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]this one doesn't unzip to the correct locations either. if you send it to the Rules folder, the zrf shows up there, but so do all the bmps, instead of appearing in rules/images/timurschess, which is where the zrf looks for them. it's a bit of a hassle create the new folder and to dig all the bmps out and move them into it. more importantly, even tho this problem is easy to solve, i wouldn't assume all users will know how to solve it - the first time i ran into this type of problem i had to ask around for help.
Grand Cavalier Chess . The decimal version of Cavalier Chess.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]this one doesn't unzip properly either. all the bmps go to a folder under rules/images called 'cavalier', but when you open the zrf, it looks for bmps under rules/images/chess... but if you transfer all the bmps to this folder, it still looks for some of them under rules/images/cavalier... i didn't sort them all out, i just gave up until somebody else fixes it.
An EconoSplurge Chess Variant Set. Chess Variant Set.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating] Bughouse Chess. 4 player variant where pieces taken from your opponent are given to your partner.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]this implimentation is not quite really exactly bughouse, since it is turn-based (i believe somebody recently put in a comment explaining that the current zillions can't handle simultaneous play on two boards). but it is still a neat implementation, and it plays well, and there's many variations programmed in. it's definitely fun to play.
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