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BishopsA game information page . four-player game.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Mar 9, 2014 07:19 PM UTC:
Starting from an existing Chess engine is probably not a good idea, as these are too specifially tailored for playing Chess. Your 'Bishops' seems to be a 4-player game, and that alone makes it so radically different from Chess that all Chess knowledge will be totally invalid. E.g. in Chess it would be good to capture a Rook at the expense of a Knight. In Bishops that seems a losing move, as it leaves the other two players unscathed. So that the average strength of you your opponents goes down 1/3 of a Rook (i.e. 5/3 = 1.66, while you lose a Knight (i.e. 3) yourself.

Personally I have always doubted the viability of multi-player Chess-like games because of this 'king-maker effect'.

Multi-player games are totally different from zero-sum two-player games, even when they do have perfect information. They require different search strategies, and opponent modeling becomes very important.