Comments by ChessShogi

This looks good as an extension of Chukaga (short for Chu Kagamigi like Chusei is for Chu Seireigi).

So close... However, a few things are worth mentioning. (Also, take notes for your other submission, Black Swan)

I. Kings and Dictators

Modest note:

"Crossing back into own territory will not make a King lose its "dictatorial powers"."

"Once a King becomes a Dictator it will remain a Dictator till the end of the game."

These sentences can be merged into one because they carry one sense.

Though so many paragraphs is not normal in my honest opinion, a blocks for each rule can be very useful for better finding the corresponding rule in the text, which is much more useful than correct visual looking.

Lev makes some good points here.

In particular, you could (and probably should) omit two sentences about Kings and Dictators and simply say that a King immediately promotes to Dictator when it crosses into enemy territory.

However, in doing so, you would need to make a separate image for the Dictator and ideally show it in the Pieces section, since it does not appear in the initial setup. Fortunately, the Musketeer Chess Board Painter (which you probably used when making the board image) lets you save the images in its image list. Simply save an appropriate-looking image and upload it to the page's directory, and you should be good.

It may also be helpful to mention that the second Dictator step cannot jump (per I understanding), to avoid confusion from Chu Shogi players, who may think the Dictator is equal to a royal Lion.

II. Paragraph Structure

This issue is way more prominent in Black Swan. It is okay to run sentences together sometimes. The point of a paragraph visually is to divide the text up so it doesn't look like one giant mass of text, making the text easier to read.

In this submission, this isn't a problem.

Redundant Sentences (My own observations)

One of the guidelines for approval is "Write clearly and briefly, so that you are quickly understood." Part of this is avoiding redundant sentences, especially if you could say the same thing by tweaking another sentence.

1. The same is true for the corresponding enemy Pawns.

2. The four Pawns on the third rank can still get a double move if they land on the fourth rank, the starting position of the 12 Pawns. 

The first sentence (1) is redundant, because it is generally understood that the rule applies to each player. To fix this you can replace the second sentence (2) in the Rules section the following:

"Pawns can still make a double move if they land on the starting square of another friendly Pawn."

This is simpler and doesn't depend on the rank number.

The King can also be called Emperor, without changing anything about the rules.

This sentence is unneccessary, and in fact counterproductive. In general, it is best to give pieces one distinct name and only refer to them by that name. However, in keeping with Roman terminology, you could call the King a Consul. (I am a bit of a history nerd, and recently watched Oversimplified's Punic Wars videos. Once this game is approved, I think I might favorite it.)

Man, I am absolutely loving the new Navigational panel on the Game Courier interface.

Only problem I can see is that it doesn't take into account the PHP flip variable in set files, which results in the second player seeing the pieces flipped in sets where image orientation matters, such as Shogi sets.

This looks good.

I think the double King step when not in check would have been an interesting idea though. But to be fair, its hard to do King promotions or enhancements well since the King is the target piece, and needs to be able to be checkmated for decisiveness in more traditional Chess games.

Now for Black Swan...

@Jean-Louis Cazaux,

I'm sure the Queen+Alibaba compound piece has been invented before. It's a simple enough piece that this is pretty much inevitable.

However, since this game is not part of your Cazaux family of games, the piece will not share the same name as your piece. However, I might rename the Queen in this game, since it is different enough from the Chess Queen that such a change would be beneficial.

As for your version of the piece, I think piece names work best when they are paired with a matching or appropriate symbol. The Medusa name would be ideal if you want to continue using the symbol you are using now.

François Houdebert managed to fix the Shogi Two Pawns bug (where a Tokin capture on a file allowed more than one Pawn to be dropped on that file) in his Jocly implementation of Seireigi.

@François Houdebert,

What did you do to fix that bug in the Seireigi implementation? Please let H. G. Muller know so we can get it fixed for Shogi and Mini Shogi, as both have the same bug. If you guys have already fixed it, we can ask Fergus to flush the server cache.

Also, if you guys decide to copy the Seireigi Shogi implementaton over to the Chess Variant Pages, I would prefer it to simply be named Seireigi for consistency reasons, but the current name works as well.

This looks good.

I think this game needs a different name for the piece. It already has a King.

The link to the Hectochess implementation is broken, please fix.

I think I will rename the Queen to General.

The board looks better but there is a weird anomaly in the pattern on the last two ranks from White's perspective, which makes it so that two of the rows appear to be merged into a single row, and that Black's white corner square is on the left.

The other problems are all fixed (including King and Queen setup).

As for castling, it shouldn't be too hard to program...I hope.

P.S. I think your update broke the Werewolf Chess image on the dashboard, just so you know.

My my, what have we here? A variant so out of the box and original while also staying mostly true to Chess. A brilliant idea with a lot of potential. Of course, there are kinks, so lets get into those.

Each player has 18 pieces.

Perhaps a list explaining how many of each piece?

• Pieces that move orthogonally (Queens and Rooks) are not allowed to be placed next to the reserved squares in the next few moves. This is to allow for both Kings the chance to come into the game. 
• If too many "reserved squares" are under attack by pieces of the same color, players have to make sure that at least one square per King is "safe"(not under direct attack). 
• When placing Pawns on the board, they also have to block eventual attacks on Kings coming from across the board. 
• Long range pieces (Queens, Rooks, and Bishops) have to be placed on the board in such a way that at least two "reserved squares" are safe for placing the Kings. 
• Short range pieces (Knights and Pawns) will have to balance the board against too much control of the long range pieces. 

Perhaps a better way of doing the setup would be to place the two Kings straight away, and then go from there, keeping each army on its own half of the board.

A problem that I quickly noticed is that after setup it may be possible for White or Black to win in a single move (example, in the last diagram White can play Qxh3#).

The only problem I can find (which probably isn't that big of a problem in the first place, but may still be worth fixing) is that it takes 50 moves w/o moving Pawns or capturing to draw in the implementation, whereas Hectochess increase that threshold to 64 due to the increased board size.

Apart from that, everything works properly.

I have renamed the Queen to Beast, which I think is pretty fitting, since the piece is basically halfway between Queen and Amazon.

I think the 64-move rule could be operational now(not tested).

From my testing it took 62 moves to reach a long game draw, so either you are slightly off. or I may have miscounted.

I did find the line of code you will need to update.

In hectochess-chess-model.js it is this block of code:

				// check 50 moves without capture
				if(this.noCaptCount>=100) {
					this.mFinished=true;
					this.mWinner=JocGame.DRAW;					
				}

It should be changed to this:

				// check 64 moves without capture
				if(this.noCaptCount>=128) {
					this.mFinished=true;
					this.mWinner=JocGame.DRAW;					
				}

As for the size of the promotion panel, I can’t change it easily, but as the number of large pieces is not limited, I can't see a situation where a bishop, rook or knight would be chosen, so the question arises of keeping them or not.

I would keep the Rook, Bishop, and Knight, for consistency reasons.

Hectochess has been out too long for me to change this. Several other programs, such as ChessV, and Ai Ai, have implemented this game, and I suspect that all of them allow these promotions.

@Fergus:

Would it be possible for us to order the pages listing Members-Only and WIP submissions by the date of the last action taken on them (creation, revision, comment, etc.) by the author? By pushing pages with the most recent actions to the top, it would greatly improve quality-of-life for the Editors who focus on reviewing submissions, as it would allow us to more easily see which pages the authors genuinely want reviewed, and which ones are just sitting on the site doing nothing (much of the stuff from 2022 and prior, and especially from 2021 and prior, does this).

My gut feeling is that it shouldn't be too hard, but I am not yet fluent enough in SQL to do this by myself yet.

I have revised all the rules and they look fine to me. I don't know what else to add. Please let me know if there is anything else. I know, the rules of this game seem to be out of this world, but please give it a chance.

I think the problem here isn't so much that the game is bad. I think it's a brilliant concept that mixes the randomness of something like Banqi with the rules of Chess.

The main problem I have with this submission, more than anything else, is that at least some of the rules are poorly communicated. From what I have seen, this is easily the number one reason new submissions don't get approved.

To (hopefully) make your life easier, I will give you the following advice:

• Make use of the Help menu at the top of the page. It is there for a reason!
• Listen to the Editors. The Editors have a lot of experience with Chess variants, oftentimes much more so than the average author. Its the reason Fergus gives the Editors these powers in the first place - he trusts us to use them as well as our expertise to help other authors get their pages published, and not abuse them in the process. So please, don't discount an Editor's opinion just because you think it is wrong.
• Study published pages made other authors. This will give you a benchmark to work from, so you have a better idea of what your submissions should do, which will be helpful not just for this submission, but for all your future submissions as well.
  • Learning the basics of technical writing helps. That's technical, not creative writing.
• Keep it simple, where possible. If you complicate your description of rules too much, you will eventually hit a tipping point where the act of understanding the rules becomes more trouble than its worth. I'm not really sure what to say to fix this...just stop trying so hard.
  • If the point of the game is to be complicated, such as in Bob's Unnecessarily Complicated Chess or Taikyoku Shogi, you'll have to strike a balancing act where the complexity doesn't cross that threshold.
• Keep your terminology consistent. This allows players to quickly refer to something they need help with. If there is any deviations, these should be hammered out.
• Make use of graphics. There's a reason the best pages on this site make use of graphics all over the place. For piece graphics, you should have at least one distinct image for each distinct piece that appears in the game somewhere on the page.
  • A good idea would be to add an image of a solid white or black circle for the Black Swan on this page, so players have an idea of what it looks like.
• Learn some HTML/CSS/JS. Even a basic understanding of the way HTML works will benefit you greatly here, as it will give you way more control over how your page looks. There are guidelines on what you should do when using HTML, see HTML Dos and Don'ts for more details on this.

I changed them to sort by ModifiedDate instead of CreationDate. However, since the revisions and comments are in separate tables of the database, the ModifiedDate will probably not reflect the last action taken.

It may not be ideal, but it's a right improvement.

Edit: This is probably the best possible ordering with the tools we have now.