Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

Play-test applet for chess variants. Applet you can play your own variant against.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Matyas Sustik wrote on Tue, Jul 2 06:01 PM UTC:

This is an interesting page and I am still digesting the information. I was hoping to use this applet to test my chess variant. It is a version of dark chess combined with chess 960 influence.

I could not yet figure out whether I can use the applet the create the following version:

  1. Board size and pieces are as in regular chess.
  2. The starting position has only the pawns for both players.
  3. The first move is to place your pieces in the first (or last) rank in any order. (Unlike in chess 960, there are no restrictions whatsoever. You can even have two same colored bishops.)
  4. This is a version of dark chess. You can see only the part of the board that your pieces can "see". A piece can see all squares directly around it and all squares it could move to as if no own pieces would be in the way. That means that a queen can see in the 8 directions until its view is blocked by an enemy piece. (The enemy piece is seen, but not beyond.) Based on this definition a knight in the center can see the 16 squares. The king has special seeing ability. The king can see much more than other pieces. It can see everything a queen would see that is on a square a king can move to. Note that this does not imply that the king cannot move onto an attacked square. For example, if the white king is on E1, and black has a bishop on F3 and a knight on G4, the king cannot see the night. If other pieces of white cannot see the night either, then the white king may decide to move to F2 and be captured.
  5. The goal is to capture the king. No stalemate.
  6. No castling.
  7. No double pawn move or en passant.
  8. 50 move rule applies.

In the starting position you only see some of your opponents pawns as they block your view. This means you do not see where your opponent's king or other major pieces are when you start.

The two players see different parts of the board and so this is best suited for computer play (or two board and arbiter is needed), hence I hoped to model it with this applet.

Is that possible? Thanks a lot!