Comments by ChessShogi

I have not played this game personally, but I must say, for a multi-move variant, this game was very well-made.

Also, the new circle symbol in GC for past moves is very nice. However, this functionality doesn't seem to work with hexagonal boards (like Hex Shogi 91's).

After maybe moving up a Pawn on each side, you move a random non-Pawn piece on each side without capturing anything, ensuring as few positional repeats as possible to avoid 3-fold repetition.

I found the problem. You have the wrong number of plies in your check for the 64-move rule, as shown below:

                if(this.noCaptCount>=124) { // this draws after 62 moves (62 * 2  = (50 + 12) * 2 = (50 * 2) + (12 * 2) = 100 + 24 = 124)
                    this.mFinished=true;
                    this.mWinner=JocGame.DRAW;                    
                }

The number 124 should be 128 (64 * 2  = (50 + 14) * 2 = (50 * 2) + (14 * 2) = 100 + 28 = 128). Like so:

                if(this.noCaptCount>=128) {
                    this.mFinished=true;
                    this.mWinner=JocGame.DRAW;                    
                }

I'm meaning to eventually get to that.

When you do, can you also add the move back/forward 1 move buttons to the page where you make a move in one of your games? It seems to be missing from that page.

Also, when I try to promote a piece in a log (such as in this log with W 13j-12k; +W-dest), when I click Preview, it redirects to a blank GC preset page.

This page looks good enough to be approved.

The rules may be slightly unclear in some places, but overall they are clear enough that approval is warranted.

This is rather intriguing.

Just a thought, but it would probably work better to either:

• Have all pieces on the same color
• Have two Kings, one for each color, and only require one of them to be checkmated to win.

This is since only half the army can reach the enemy King in the current version, and would be quite drawish if that half got depleted.

The page works quite well in presentation though.

Also, when you modify a page, if you change the Modification date in its metadata so that it is more recent, you can push it closer to the top of the Unprocessed Submissions list.

Queens without the conquer rule has been played many times on Game Courier and has always come to checkmate or one side has resigned. Queens with the conquer rule will be no different.

You'd be surprised at how much a simple rules change can affect a game. Take Annan Shogi. It adds only one new rule - that if the moving pieces has a friendly piece directly behind it, it moves as that piece instead of itself. This doesn't sound like much, but it changes the game so much that the setup is changed and other rules are relaxed or tweaked to account for it.

While the conquer mechanism is interesting, the perpetual capture problem definitely holds it back a lot in terms of playability. The reason normal Queens works is because the pieces get removed from the game after being captured. Because this is not the case in the conquer version, and the flipped pieces is on the origin square, it is very easy for pieces that move alike to perpetually capture one another, making the conquer mechanism very drawish as it is now.

This mechanism might work with piece rosters with a lot of forward bias (e.g. Shogi), but this idea is untested.

Okay, so maybe I was a bit harsh on the conquer rule, and in hindsight lost sight of my review process...what can I say, human beings are strange sometimes.

Overall, the page looks good.

However, since the revisions and comments are in separate tables of the database, the ModifiedDate will probably not reflect the last action taken.

Just a thought, but would it be possible to list these two values separately? Perhaps this would give the Editors a better clue of the state of a page.

I have approved this page.

Some of your wording could use some work, again owing to your Russian roots. However, the page does its job.

Wild Rose (Queen) - this piece combines the functions of the Queen and the King: it can move and capture like a Queen, it cannot be captured, but it can be declared check or checkmate like a regular King in chess.

How so? Also, the inability to be captured basically nullifies check and thus checkmate.

Also, what happens if you have more than two Wild Roses? How does that affect win/loss conditions?

This looks significantly better in terms of covering all possible situations, save for the following:

• Clarifying the rules on the Pawn's double step that Reiniger mentioned
  • Does the double step for Pawns also apply to White Swans?
• A distinctive piece image for the Black Swan
• The movement of the Black Swan

There are other improvements that could be made as well, but these shouldn't really be a blocker to publication.

If a White Swan coming from the first rank gets flipped over on the second rank, it can be subject to capturing.

This should be in the Rules section in my opinion, if it is meant as a rule. You may want to be careful with this though, as you may encounter a problem with having to keep track of which White Swan started where, and thus which ones are able to be captured.

Unfortunately, only three player's Frogs per game can promote to Tsarevnas.

Do you mean to say here that only three Frogs per player can promote to Tsarevnas?

This rule is unnecessary in my opinion, as there is already a limit on how many Tsarevnas can be on the board at a time, and the piece that promotes to it, the Frog, cannot deliver checkmate by itself.

I guess technically this is a chess variant by that definition.

There's no garauntee that players will get five Frogs in the first place (which is required for checkmate with two Frogs to happen at all with the limit surpassed), since pieces are removed from the game as in Chess. And from what I can tell, there is no way to tell how many Tsarevnas one has obtained over the course of a game with the equipment one has on the board. except through looking at the game log, and most players don't keep track of that when playing over-the-board.

All pawns are capable of en-passant capture (taking a piece, which’ve just moved two squares, by moving to square it have passed, if possible). But only half of pawns (F, P, A, S) can be taken by this way.

For en passant, I assume that the moving Pawn has to land on the square that was passed over? If so, how does the Warrior capture en passant, since it captures in the same way that the en-passant-capturable Pawns move?

The new Tenjiku sprites look great. Can we also get similar versions for Chu Shogi, Shogi, and Mini Shogi?

Also, the new cache rule for jocly means we can fix the Two Pawns bug in Shogi and the Three Swallows bug in Tori Shogi (the former doesn't apply to Mini Shogi). If it involves switching lines, I could fix it right now for you, if you tell me which lines to swap.

Same en-passant question also applies to the Footer.