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Here's a possible way to structure a face-to-face tournament that includes Chess variants for advanced levels. All pieces exist, though some are not currently in production, and boards could be made by cutting up regular mousepad chess boards and rearranging pieces. Start with Chess (8x8), then Embassy Chess(10x8), then Eurasian Chess(10x10), then Omega Chess(10x10+4), then finish with Gross Chess(12x12).

Fergus,

How many points would players get, or at least a victory in Gross chess should worth more that a victory in Omega chess as a tiebreak, in order to also increase stakes as the tournament passes.

H.G.

"So there now is a corrected file at http://www.membergraphics/MSinteractive-diagrams/betza.gif ."

It doesn't work from here. When I paste this link in my broser it says: Server not found.

Sorry, part of the URL must have been accidentally deleted. I corrected it now in the original posting.

HG,

Now it works well!

I've reached a conundrum. I am far from being a chess grand master, I blunder way to often usually full pieces, the last time I missed a pin, silly me. I can't test the game further into endgame because of that. At my level the game becomes played quite soon, as chances for blunders are increased. On the other hand it was supposed to be an enhancement to the play at high levels. Do you see the conundrum?

I don't get it. Who/what are you playing against? A computer? If you play against yourself, how come you overlook a pin and then punish it? I would expect you would overlook it for both sides in that case.

The method I use to see how a Chess variant typically progresses is configuring Fairy-Max to play it, and then watch Fairy-Max play against itself in blitz games. There is one slight complication in this case: Fairy-Max allows only a single rank of pieces to be configured in its game definitions for the start position of a variant (and then adds a rank of Pawns itself). Your game would need two ranks with pieces. This could be solved with an external start position, but it could be simpler to use Sjaak II instead. This can be configured for arbitrary start positions.

I still host a package of WinBoard + Sjaak pre-configured to play Sac Chess ( http://hgm.nubati.net/SacChess.zip ). You could use that, and change the game definition of Sac Chess in Sjaak's variants.txt file into that of your own games. (Or duplicate it, and change one.)

Not sure if you can make the promotion choice dependent on the rank in Sjaak II, however. If not, you could forbid promotion to Q,A,M everywhere, but you would not be able to see how often it would make use of that possibility if it had existed.

Thanks, H.G. As always helpful!

I was playing against myself, after you blunder a piece you can't go back, and I don't remember the whole game after 25 moves (actually less). Also I did not kept records. I think though it is a good idea now that I advanced a little bit to keep records as some games could prove interesting.

Thanks, for all the help!

Hmm, that is true, it only allows you to play moves in the final position of the stored game, and there is no button to truncate the game. Perhaps I should put that on the to-do list.

A solution would be to define the diagram with holdingsType=1. That would place captured pieces in the piece table, (i.e. increase the holdings counter there), from which you could then drop them back on the board. So that you can even undo captures. Of course if you make a non-capture blunder you can simply make the reverse move. It would be stored as part of the game, but who cares? There is no way to permanently save the game anyway.

I think there is a way with sjaak to implement my way of promotion. Just create 2 different promotion zones, allow promotion to pawn when the case and that's it. Not tried it yet.

One think I haven't confessed yet is that I partially like the idea of chess960. Having different starting position is interesting. But not ANY different position. I think in many games you can fine tune 2 to n different setups. And then choose among them. I'm not the first who thought at this I'm sure.

How this does affect this post. I'd like apothecary 1 and apothecary 2 to have 2 possible initial positions. The first one is the one already presented named from now until the hereafter the bishops in or knights out position. The second one name from now until the hereafter the bishops out or knights in has the bishops and knights (each variant with it's own knights) switched.

With sjaak I can just plug two variants with the 2 starting setups, but with the diagram from the presumed variant page it's more complicated, I assume a button switching between the two positions will be involved.

It's that hard to do H.G.? Can you help me with that , too?

H.G.,

I have not managed to define the Aanca and the Griffin in Sjaak. Have you any idea?

On the last matter I think the Aanca may be Leap(1,0)+Slide(d,a), but I have to check, the griffin is somewhat similar. The trouble with the griffin is that you have to ban 4 steps (the ones like an wazir).

Ummm... Now that you mention it, bent sliders could be a problem in Sjaak II. That would mean you can do only one of your variants with Sjaak II.

You could simply make multiple copies of the game definition with different initial positions and a slightly different name (like apothecary1a and apothecary1b). The should show up in WinBoard's 'New Variant' menu, where you can choose between them.

For Aanca and Gryphon you might be convicted to Fairy-Max, however. The game definitions there are much more cryptic and cumbersome than in Sjaak II, though. I can try to create a definition for it, but it would take some time. For now, concentrate on the version without Aanca/Gryphon.

well, for an Aanca I can use the property of sliders that their move is a union of many lame leaper moves. But you should see that formula, and moreover, I don't think that is recomended programming wise. I still haven't give up.

That doesn't work either!

what if I convinct myself to FairyMAx for both games, just for symetry, I think I can handle weird scripts!

OK, in Fairy-Max 5.0 you can add the following definition to the fmax.ini file (e.g. at the end,just before the line "end of game file"). Then you can select apothecary1 from WinBoard's New Variant dialog when you loaded Fairy-Max as engine. Note that the piece values currently in the definition (after the colon) are blind guesses, so that play might not be optimal at all. You can replace them by your own.

You can download Fairy-Max 5.0from http://hgm.nubati.net/Fairy-Max.zip, and unpack it in the WinBoard folder of the Sac Chess download. You can then use WinBoard's Load Engine dialog to browse to the executable (fmax.exe).

Note that the initial setup is all wrong, because of this limitation of a single rank of pieces. So you would have to create a FEN of the desired setup somewhere, and then copy-paste it into WinBoard before every game. This can be automated, but at this point that might not be worth it.

[Edit] Oh, and to prevent that WinBoard loads Sjaak and switches to Sac Chess every time, you would have to edit the file winboard.ini, so that it selects Fairy-Max in stead of Sjaak, and sets the variant to "apothecary1" instead of "sac".

H.G., I think I'm all lost!

I can't figure how to set up the proper initial position. As a matter a fact I'm not sure I understand much from what you send me earlier(the text for the .ini  file i mean) besides the board on some piece movements. But you have put an example with all the pieces, so that's fine. I'll manage with that.

Well, the FEN for the start position of Apothecary1 is

r2wccw2r/1anbqkbng1/pppppppppp/10/10/10/10/PPPPPPPPPP/1ANBQKBNG1/R2WCCW2R w - - 0 1

You could copy-paste that to WinBoard after you set it to apothecary1 (by Ctrl-V or the menu item Edit->Paste Position).

To automate this you could save that FEN in a file called apo1.fen, and add a line at the bottom of the winboard.ini file in the Sac Chess install:

/loadPositionFile=apo1.fen

This should make WinBoard use the position in that file for every New Game, loading it into the engine. The winboard.ini file would then look something like:

/settingsFile=settings.ini
/saveSettingsFile=settings.ini
;
/cp
/fcp="fmax.exe"
/fd="./Fairy-Max"
/scp="fmax.exe"
/sd="./Fairy-Max"
;
/variant=apothecary1
/size=middling
/autoLogo true
;
/showTargetSquares=true
/pieceMenu=false
/sweepPromotions=true

It gave an error, forfeit due to invalid move, I guess white wanted to promote at 8 rank!

For some reason the AI pushes pawns very late.

> It gave an error, forfeit due to invalid move, I guess white wanted to promote at 8 rank!

Ah, you would have to switch Test Legality off (in the General Options dialog), or WinBoard would indeed think only promotions on last rank are legal.

I would keep points equal, but I don't run face-to-face tournaments, and if anyone did run a tournament like this, how they handled points would be up to them.