Comments by benr

1. I don't understand the pawn drop rules. Am I allowed to drop a pawn that attacks the opponent's Jade if they have no pieces that could capture the pawn? If so, do I win?

2. I really don't understand Jitai. When exactly does it become effective? What are the "props" currently mentioned? If both players have fewer than 31 points do they both lose (is that a draw?)?

3. I'd suggest the first promotion rule being changed from "are promoted" to "may be promoted", since it seems the intention is that promotion is always optional.

4. In defining Sennichite, "phase" and "shape" should be replaced by "board position" or "game state", if one of those accurately captures your meaning. You mention "Highground" in the playoff, but that doesn't seem to exist in this game?

This looks promising to me.

Having such mobile royal pieces (even limited to two sliding, which I overlooked at first) may lead to indecisive games. I think your suggestion for winning after capturing 2-3 royals is a good one.

The short-range phoenix and giraffe maybe would be better to start up one rank? And the rook, bishop, knightrider back?

@Fergus, @Greg: are gmail-address registrations possible then? There's an email in the main inbox looking to do so.

I'd suggest different piece images for the tower and guard; especially FIDE pieces' images being used for different pieces is confusing. (Maybe the war machine and elephant?)

I'm also curious how putting both Men (slower) on one side and both Knights (faster) on the other affects play.

I also like the new piece images.

I don't understand the part of fourfold repetition concerning checks. Could you clarify that please? (I guess the main point is that "forcing" the fourfold repetition by chasing loses instead of draws, but how is that formalized? If the position that is repeated four times includes one side being in check, then that side wins? What does the last clause [about checking consecutively] mean?)

Very innovative!

Would the "advance" step of a barrier be better phrased as one end jumping over the other? If it is the same, it seems slightly better in that it's more obviously one "step".

With just the first alternate game-end rule (capture a poisoned pawn and lose), this seems like something that might exist (but I can't find it with a quick search, though that's hindered by the "poisoned pawn variations" of FIDE chess). The other rules probably make this new.

Given that "poisoned pawn" does represent a situation in FIDE, I'd like to suggest a different name here, but one doesn't come immediately to mind.

Also, please clarify if you choose one of your pawns to be poisoned, or can you choose one of your opponent's instead? Given the last rule, this isn't obviously a bad idea if allowed.

I've been unable to view any of our php pages on my phone (Android, with Firefox, Chrome, and DuckDuckGo) the past couple of days. I can switch to "Desktop site" and it works fine, but the mobile version just displays the off-white background of the site and no content.

Thanks for adding the images on same-line restrictions. I think the knight one could be improved by showing that the knight can continue on its same line (if I'm understanding the text rules correctly).

I think this page would benefit from some discussion on the reasoning behind the restrictions, especially as compared to other double-move variants (I've added the tag double-move to as many as I could find). I'm also unclear why the variant has three different names, only the first of which seems at all related to the game's mechanics (but I think suggests somewhat the opposite of the same-line restrictions...).

Hi Christine!

That's how we generally manage it, yes: start the post as a Game Page, and an editor can change the type, presumably to a Piece Article to match part 1.

One other question has occurred to me, and I don't see it addressed (but maybe just missed it). If the first move reveals check, can the second move capture the king?

Looks good! First pass comments:

This strikes me as being much more than a privacy policy; maybe some of it (e.g. the password security section, the OpenID note) can be factored out to a separate page. One thing to consider is how much obligation we have to alert users to updates to the privacy policy: keeping it slim makes it less likely we will want to make a change.

I would suggest adding something about the person deletion policy here.

For what it's worth, this chameleon is listed in the Fairy Glossary of the Problemist / British Chess Problem Society, and is featured in a number of puzzles at Julia's Fairies problem site.

We should tackle the external images; one of:

1. bypass the upload limit temporarily
2. shrink the image data size without hurting quality too much
3. add a way for editors to hide the external image warning block (case-by-case)
4. maybe OK certain external sites? github ought to be pretty stable?

For Harding's article: Dead links is a regular part of niche internet interests, unfortunately. I would use the Wayback Machine archive. Additionally, it might be worth adding that piece as being invented "in the 1960s by George Botterill", and changing "Harding's Transcendental Prelate" to "Botterill's" in the anchorite paragraph.

For naming on this page, I disagree in part with H.G.: if we come to some consensus here, then it will probably trickle into variants. People are welcome to name pieces however they want in variants, absolutely, but anyone finding this page before re-inventing the piece will be at least slightly inclined to use this name. If we can't come to anything close to consensus, then I'd suggest the article title to actually be something like "Wazir-then-bishop", and anything for the text.

Personally, I think avoiding Aanca is best (but of course with an index entry for Aanca pointing to this page, and I would suggest mentioning earlier in the article the Aanca name). I'd be pretty happy with either Anchorite or Acromantula. (I get the preference for non-modern myth, but don't think it's more important than other considerations.) I also like Manticore.

So a pawn on d4/e5 can only switch between those two locations (similarly for d5/e4), until an opportunity to capture arises? I guess the four-directional capture partially makes up for their dramatically lower ability to promote? How have pawn structures developed, in playtesting?

Why convert the knight as well? (It might be worth noting the common name for that piece, the camel.)

Very interesting! But I also have a hard time understanding this all at once.

You should give prominent definitions for "end zone" and "end field". I think the whole page would be easier to grasp quickly if you briefly described some of the rules earlier: the three options for a turn, and how pieces "throw" the stones. Then later you can clarify the differences between stones and peculiarities of piece-stone interactions. And any of the piece descriptions that can be slimmed down would be helpful (e.g., the pieces that don't have special stone-placement rules don't need to reiterate how they place stones).

(If the standard page sections are too restrictive, you can move everything into the Introduction section and add headers yourself.)