Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

There was a poll about what should happen when a mimic lands on a promotion tile. The results are:

Promote just like the last moved piece.

7% 2 votes

Promote only as a mimic base piece.

15% 4 votes

All options - last moved piece and mimic.

63% 17 votes

I have no idea what this means.

11% 3 votes

Something else.

4% 1 vote

Not sure I have seen that poll.

But I would say that a mimic moves / promotes / does whatever as the rules of the variant it participates in says it does. It is not a standard piece. Usually mimicking is about moving, and things like promotions or royalty are not part of the move. Of course you could define a piece that mimics the promotion of the last-moved piece too. Or even only that, always keeping its own move, but allowed to promote on it (no matter where it goes) when the opponent promoted. Or even promote in its own prescribed way when the opponent promoted. The possibilities are endless. Of course promotion of a mimic would in general make it a non-mimic. (Unless a game has various types of mimics in it.)

A generalization of a mimic is a piece whose move and/or other properties depends in some way on the previous move of the opponent.

If you get again at the joker, maybe you can find some time to think about the transferrer (joker for chess with different armies). Not very important though, as I will write my own C++ program eventually. The one I'm writing is going well.

The poll was on a Discord server.

OK, I see. This seems more about an issue how a mime piece that can be selected from a menu in a particular piece of software should behave to be most generally useful than a discussion about chess-variant design. In such configurable software the solution I discussed with Aurelian seems more flexible (and in fact upward compatible) than any of the options in the poll: allow the user to define an arbitrary mapping similar to the capture matrix between moved piece and what the mime should move as. The promoChoice strings could contain a newly defined special symbol to indicate "as the last-moved piece can promote". This decouples move mimicking from promotion mimicking.