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Rule Zero. A base or starting rule set for most Chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Rich Hutnik wrote on Sun, Sep 7, 2008 04:37 AM UTC:

I do applaud the effort here.  More needs to be done in this area.

However, I disagree with the pawn promotion rule.  Currently chess has a '9 Queen' problem.  It is theoretically possible in Normal chess for a player to have 9 queens.  The problem is that NO chess set provides you 9 queens.  This problem will get worse when you add variants.  Unless we want to have 'Jester' pieces who act as wildcards, and officially codify it in the rules (today a flipped rook in FIDE chess would be a Jester), the need for the rules and pieces to match should be dealt with.

I would recommend that whatever is the base rules, aka Rule Zero here, state that pawns can only promote to material that exists in the game, and accounted for my the rules, enabling players to also differentiate whose pieces belong to whom when promoting.  This is far more robust than the Rule Zero promotion rules.

I am interested in hearing someone argue against this, particularly when dealing with physical chess equipment.