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OK, I see. But this is only in the start position, right?

I suppose there is a more serious issue where "works as designed" does not cover "works as desired": when a Joker is moved the other Joker in the next (half) move still imitates what that Joker imitated. Instead of the mapping of what it imitated.

Regarding my previous comment. I was not talking about the current work on transferring powers, but at an older issue.

It seems that the imitated move changes when I click a piece and not just when the opponent moves. This is undesirable.

Nice idea about the recursivitty of the transferrer.

But can you give an example where it happens? Is this a betzaNew.js problem or did betza.js already suffer from it?

I have sent my diagrams in an email.

OK, I see. The piece you click should have moves that get highlighted, in order for the Joker to imitate it. This was a consequence of introducing legality testing on highlighted moves, which must make the move first. I now save the old value of the imitated type before starting the legality test, and restore it afterwards. That should fix it.

Thanks!

I now also made it such that after a Joker move the imitated type is mapped to a new type as well, rather than staying the same. So the rule is that a Joker imitates the defined 'successor type' of the last moved or imitated piece type. Where by default the successor of each type is the type itself.

Considered by who? In my eyes it is more a hybrid. It keeps the pieces from Dai that were in Chu, but the large Shogi variants all do that. The pieces that distingush Dai from Chu were all thrown out. Although one might argue that the promotion-on-capture rule is the decisive difference.

But of course there is nothing against hybrids.

Buddhist Spirit is also an interesting power piece.

Well, now that I am back to inventing Chess Variants and being more involved in general, I think using only the Dai Shogi (-like) move types would make for a more interesting challenge. Especially now that the Shock Chess rule is implemented, which makes for a much simplet trading rule without making pieces basically immortal.

P.S. I posited a question about the shock rule in relation to multi-movers, which you can find here.

If you remember the Joker does not imitate fully "special" pieces. So it does not promote, nor castle, etc. . This feature helps with that too.

Well, promotion or royalty is never considered part of the move, and would not be imitated by an I atom. But this feature can indeed be used to suppress imitation of special moves, such as Pawn double-pushes or the King's castling.

Would this be a viable idea? A variant with (for each side) 8 minors, 4 rook-class pieces, 8 super-pieces, 2 royals and 2 virtually unstoppable missiles, filling the first two ranks behind a pawn rank. The super-pieces and royals would all be locked in on the back rank, unable to escape before the opponent's missiles wiped out two 3x3 areas, each containing 3 super-pieces, two minors, one rook-class piece, 2 minors and 3 pawns. Something like:

After the pre-emptive strike each player would be left with 2 super-pieces, 2 rook-class pieces, 4 minors, 2 royals and 6 Pawns. But the first few opening moves would determine which pieces these are. The idea is that variants with very many pieces either tend to either take a very long time to play, or most pieces would not be used at all. So we might as well make it clear from the beginning which pieces will not get used, by eliminating those in the early opening. Both players will have a say in exactly which pieces will get eliminated.

Each player has two royals; to win they must capture one and checkmate the other. This to make it not too easy to wipe out enemy royalty through missile strikes. A player could decide to blow up one of the royals instead of a super-piece, but then it must be possible to save the other. Perhaps it would need some powerful initial move for that, like flying to any empty square on the back rank.

The missiles have Grasshopper-like moves and start on 2nd rank. This enable them to jump out immediately over the Pawn-wall in various ways. But doing so narrows down their possible strike location, as once out they are not very mobile anymore. To compensate for that they have grasshopping Griffon and Manticore moves, to go around any blocker the opponent might try to throw into the orthogonal or diagonal missile trajectory.

A little bit of playtesting with the interactive diagram it looks like the basic premise doesn't work out: It is not only possible but also advised to exchange one of the missiles by striking at your opponents missile. White is practically forced to follow this path, otherwise Black would get a free second strike. Black eliminates White second missile in the counter-strike.

It is also possible to eliminate a Royal piece using the missile strike (don't know if this is a good idea for the attacker since other pieces have higher fighting value).

A little bit of playtesting with the interactive diagram it looks like the basic premise doesn't work out: It is not only possible but also advised to exchange one of the missiles by striking at your opponents missile. White is practically forced to follow this path, otherwise Black would get a free second strike. Black eliminates White second missile in the counter-strike.

This seems more a problem with the initial setup than with the concept. I gues sthis occurs because it is possible for a Missile to fork the two opponent Missiles in the opening move. I don't have much leeway there, though, if I want every explosion location on the 2nd rank to destroy about the same value, accounting for the Missile staart squares to be empty.

I could make the Missiles immune for explosion though; the 'fork' in the current setup is not by two direct hits. This makes sense, as Missiles are supposed to be kept in hardened silos, which would require a direct hit to damage them. If only a direct attack on one of the Missiles would result from the opening move, black would simply move the attacked Missile away to position it for his own attack.

Blowing up a royal could be a tactic; I tried to set it up such that you don't destroy much less when you do that. A second royal King is worth nearly

 a Rook in Spartan Chess, and might be worth more here due to the large number of super-pieces. I put the most valuable super-pieces (Queen and Squire) next to the royals, and put the latter so far from the Missiles that the blast to destroy a royal would not hit the (presumably empty) Missile start square. So that you also get an extra minor from the 2nd rank.

Even hitting one of the Dragon Horses could be a viable tactic. You would destroy 5 rook-class pieces (including the royal) plus a minor (which I now made the Bishop, which is the most-valuable minor on such a large board). That seems a bit less than destroying 3 super-pieces plus two minors, which you could get by striking elsewhere. But for those strikes the Rhino would be amongst the super-piece victims, and this is a relatively weak super-piece (about halfway between Queen and Rook on 8x8). Plus that you would get a very significant manifestation of the leveling effect, when the opponent still has so many super-pieces that you could harrass with your Rooks and Dragon Horses. So it might be more even than it looks.

Tactically probably not quiet yet. I had a mate in 4 with the current setup:

1. Md4 Mk9 2. Mi4 Bh9 3. Mdxd11 Mi9 4. Mb4

The carriers as additional hurdles for the grasshopper missiles make the missiles deadlier than ever.

What is to stop a player from using both his missiles to kill the royals? You could instead start the missiles outside the pawn line and add two more royals so there would always be two royals surviving.

The setup obviously should be such that killing both royals quickly is impossible. One can be killed easily; my first thought was that providing two would be enough. A player could decide to save one of his Missiles for the purpose of killing the one remaining royal later. But he would be 3 super-pieces plus 2 minors behind in the mean time, and with such a material lead I figured protecting the remaining royal should be possible. The Missiles only have Grasshopper-type moves, and should not easily penetrate deeply in enemy territory. A Pawn chain already would be an effective defence, once the Pawns get advanced.

As I wrote in my first post, the royals should have some powerful initial move to make the quick double-kill impossible. I did not implement that yet in the Diagram. But if, say, it was allowed for the King to swap with any piece on the back rank as first move, the position given by Jörg would not be a checkmate.

I admit that I had not foreseen that adding the Carriers would make the Missiles much more mobile. The purpose of the Carriers was to act as a relay for developing the slow leapers: any leaper that would hop onto one would be able to hop off as a non-capturing Queen in the same turn. Due to some technical problems with the Interactive Diagram that I have to fix first this doesn't work yet.

I was a bit dissatisfied with the Missile anyway, in the sense that I would want it to also explode on moving to an empty square. But since the explosion kills friend and foe alike, that would make it impossible to develop the Missile. Even exempting friendly pieces from destruction by the explosion would destroy the Missile itself. A solution would be to distinguish moves that hop over a friend from those that hop over a foe, and only explode on the latter. But if I make that distinction, I might as well limit the friendly hopping to the Alibaba moves. Then the Carriers would not provide much extra mobility for the Missiles; the latter could only hop between squares that they could have reached in a single move anyway.

Anyway, thanks a lot for the feedback!

Maybe you can define an explosion zone for the missiles, such that it explodes only in the enemy's back ranks, otherwise it is just a pimped up grasshopper.

Hello HG, Can you find the time to add a modern ID to the Xiangqi article? Many things have change with the ID since the ID you have placed in the comments.

Please tell me how to change the status of my recent article from private.

Click the Edit Metadata for this Page. There should be a menu with 2 options, ‘Private’ & ‘Members‐Only’; you can change that & then click the send button at the bottom of that page.

As a new contributor who has not yet gotten any submissions published, you are limited to submitting three of your games for review and publication at one time. If you would like to post more, cooperate with the editors to get your submissions accepted, or revert something to a work-in-progress and submit something else.

@HaruN Y

Thanks for your reply. But this is error like an above. How to work this out?

Hi,

Could you please provide some feedback about my new chess variant submission (https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/swaps), which I changed after you previous comments?

Thanks

Hello! I have sent you an email and I'm not sure you've got it as there are a few days since then. May you please answer it!

I hope I don't come of too much as a nagger, but I am waiting an answer from an email I have sent you.