Game Reviews (and other rated comments on Game pages)

This indeed is a great game. I have played it for a few times now and my
favourite way of mating is leaving the Anti-King unchecked with the same
move as I check the ordinary King. Sort of a double check wich, as I
interpret the rules leads to a mate.

Good game

Tomas

Very nice introduction to bughouse. For the players interested in 
online bughouse the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) located at
www.freechess.org is a very good starting point.

Another variant could be, and this probably exists under some name, to
start with two boards and two sets of pieces each. Except that there would
be no King on the second board.

Just a thought.

The game is very fun to play however.

Tomas

I played the trial version of Chesk 1.0.  The artwork, audio, and user
interface are very good.  I also like the basic premise of the game, since
combining games like this is a hobby of mine.

The main drawback for me is that the program's AI isn't very good.  I'm not
an expert chess player by any means, but I defeated 5 computer opponents
fairly easily.  The game mentions that this is version 1.0 of the AI, so I
presume they're going to work on improving it.  I imagine that's no simple
task, since AI is very complex for standard chess, let alone 6-player
chess.  But if they can pull it off, that would make the overall game very
impressive.

One other curiosity about the game: there are no bishops.  I'm not sure why
they were excluded.  The board's irregular shape would make them less
powerful than on a standard square board, but that doesn't mean they should
be left out altogether.  Does anyone know why this is?

I haven't yet tried the on-line version of the game against other people.  
Can anyone comment on that?

Overall, I think this is a good game.  I look forward to version 2.0
someday.

Mike Smolowitz

An 'Excellent' to the editor!

Several excellent people have also given excellent ratings for my game, for
which I thank.

It is common for the neophyte chess variant author to invent his first game
and tout it as the inevitable replacement for Chess. We all laugh at
this.

It is uncommon for somebody who has authored thousands of highly-regarded
chess variants to refer to one of his inventions as the most likely
evolutionary future of the game of Chess. I hope we all take this
seriously.

I do not expect that CwDA will become widely played, much less overtake
FIDE Chess, within my lifetime; nor do I expect that when it does the same
primitive armies that I designed will be used. However!

However, it was 1976 when I first conceived of the game, and 1996 when I
composed the first succcessful army (Colorbound Clobberers). Twenty years.
My first attempts were so bad; and I realized that in order to creat this
game I needed to explore the problem of the values of chess pieces. And so
I did.

Twenty years. A large part of one's life. Don't imagine that I thought
about the problem every day of every year, no, that's not how it went at
all! I worked on it, and I gave up in bafflement, and I came back to it
after a few years of not thinking about it, and then I gave up and came
back and tried again and gave up and came back and tried again and so on.
Not so much brilliant as really stuborn.

Remember that I am a genuinely certified master of FIDE Chess: I know and
love the openings, endgames, midgames. Chess with Different Armies has
satisfied my expectations of what Chess should be -- it has openings,
endgames, midgames, all with the general feel of real serious FIDE Chess,
but of course it's different. Someday, the Grandmasters will begin to play
my game, and because they are so strong they will find imbalances in the
particulat armies I designed -- and I don't care, because once they start,
they're hooked. Meanwhile, nobody can design any chess variant without at
least thinking about different armies! I am pleased to see this, because I
had expcted that my mind's greatest invention would not be recognized so
soon; and yet I always hope for more. Chess with Different Armies (together
with the essential work on piece values) is, I think, a really
revolutionary idea even though my own work on these subjects is so
hopelessly bad (I look good now, but when real mathematicians take a run at
the val
use and real Grandmasters start to evaluate my armies, watch out!) What an
accomplishemnt, and did you know that with that accomplishment I only need
a buck fifty to ride the subway?

This looks amusing.  It does seem that the scoring system encourages the
other players to turn on the first player significantly damaged like 
starving wolves, lest they be left without any pieces of the eliminated
player when it comes time to score.  Not a game to play with someone who
takes attacks personally!

An omnidirectional Pawn is actually mWcF -- mFcW is an omnidirectional
Berolina Pawn.

This page might benefit from an ASCII diagram to backup the Javascript --
I first looked at it with Javascript turned off and was puzzled.

Or maybe just good because it needs a King.

If you look at my 'chess for any number of players', you will see that
there is specific attention played to the problem of multiplayer stalling
-- that is, keeping all your pieces safe until the other players have been
weakened by fighting among themselves.

However, the scoring system of this game implicitly rewards the fighter and
penalizes the use of Fabian tactics; that is extremely new and clever, I
think.

But it needs Kings.

Even without Kings, I can foresee that there will be some highly
interesting situations where, for example, two different players are on the
verge of being eliminated. Let's say that player A is all set to win if B
is eliminated first and player C can win by eliminating player D first.
Suddenly it becomes possible for player D to attack player A with impunity!
A dares not capture a piece belonging to D, because it would bring C that
much nearer to victory. This can get pretty exciting, don't you think?

I still think it needs Kings, and checkmate.

Crowd Chess 1: http://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/crowded1.html

Crowd Chess 2: http://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/crowded2.html

Multiple Occupancy Miscellany:
http://www.chessvariants.com/boardrules.dir/multocc.html

My nextdoor neighbor in Brooklyn was also a fire-fighter, and was not a big
man, but strong.  We broke up our common driveway with sledgehammers, and I
was impressed.