Comments by arx

You could try copying the black pieces behind the white ones to provide the fill color.

I've been working on this game and I'm having a problem I can't figure out how to solve. If white starts by moving a pawn to f8 or g8, the black king shows no legal moves, although if a valid king move is entered it is accepted. I think it has something to do with how I have a few pieces that use multi-stage moves with the second stage being made automatically. It's just not clear why it doesn't work.

I've just noticed that in the rule enforcing preset for Glinski's chess, several valid knight leaps are not marked as legal from the initial position.

According to the description with the animated illustration linked to on this page, the chameleon "can only capture Pinching Pawns by moving like a Rook."

It occurred to me that the problem I was having with king moves might be because I was setting after in a for loop but not resetting it to false before the next piece was evaluated. Changing that does seem to solve the problem. There might still be better ways to do this with the fairychess system.

I do like the idea of having a non-displacement capture entered with only one click on the target piece because that's the easiest way I can see to disambiguate between a capture and a non-capture in cases where both would result in the moving piece landing on the same destination. The difficulty I have with that is making the notation work with it, since if I record the extra move, it isn't considered legal in some situations.

The new preset is allowing Chameleons to capture pawns with diagonal moves.

This is a great idea. The bombs add enough chaos to make the game feel very different, but not too much.

Ludii is interesting, but the language it uses for defining games confuses me so much I can't imagine trying to describe anything as complex as a chess variant with it.

I suggest Shako

I think the 16x16 board looks better. It seems less arbitrary than the 18x18 with lots of irregular gaps in the setup.

I think the knight and camel look too similar to be easily distinguished.

What would be a good way to define a piece for a hexagonal board that can slide through any path exactly 3 spaces long to any space that is no fewer than 3 spaces away? When I try checkpath or checknsteps the result is wrong because they assume a square grid.

Your problem is this line:

add h all b7 b8 c7 c8 f7 f8 h7 h8;

You want this piece on g7 and g8 instead of h7 and h8. If you change that it should work.

What about FyaflF or mRpR? I imagine those might be close to a rook. Or maybe something like R3fB3. Maybe it depends on what other pieces you have

I was running out of ideas for how to speed up such large games. And for the variants I had in mind (14x14 and 16x16) the ideas I already discussed seemed sufficient for making those playable. A fundamental issue is that it takes at least as many moves as you have pieces to move all your pieces.

I've always liked the concept of the transport pieces in Jetan Jeddara as a way to speed up large games.

For [N-Q] 'outward' would be ambiguous, as it would require some advanced geometry, which most people would not master, to decide whether the adjacent diagonal or the orthogonal continuation had the smallest angle with the N leap.

Another possibility is that [N-fQ] could be interpreted as a combination of [N-fR] and [N-fB]. I think of 'outward' in continuations as excluding any crossing of a queen's path from the starting square.