4-Die Chess
erinbern.com
erinbern.com
Never-mind the impossibility of Kings playing en-passant, there is also the concept introduced of "higher piece" without defining an order. Can a bishop upgrade to a knight? Can a knight upgrade to a Bishop? Can a rook upgrade to a bishop?
Despite the popular "valuing" of pieces, they aren't actually in the rules of chess and need to be stated.
> If a king is within its starting row, it can castle with both rooks.
What does it mean to castle with both rooks? Is that a typo for "either"?
Also it seems to suggest that you can move the king along the starting rank and still castle later. How would that work if your king was on b8 for example?
This is a strange kind of nonsense. It shows the difficulty of translating some home-brew rules into actual rules that others can follow.
On reaching the last row it’s the same promotion rules as pawns.
Re castling what they’re saying is that you can keep castling with rooks provided your king has never left the home row (ie the rook would have to leave to let you castle with the other one). A7 implies the king has left the home row and can no longer castle.
I do agree that there is ambiguity to clarify though:
* where is the castled position when the rooks aren’t in their starting position?
* what on earth does en pessant mean for kings?
You might very well be correct though. So I agree with the previous poster that there's too much ambiguity here.
One thing I'd like to know is the ELO rating of the variant creator. Is this a game that someone who understands standard chess very well came up with and play-tested, or is it a game that someone with passing familiarity with chess thought of off the cuff? If the latter, the chances that the game is a well-balanced variant are not so high.
Also, is "baring" a typo for "barring"?
Finally it should be noted that dice chess is already a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dice_chess
Yeah, kings playing en-passant, rule 2, seems useless. The king moves in all eight directions, you can just like, take the piece. If the two kings try to pass each other, the passing king will check the opposing king, end the turn, then you just take the piece. Unless you're automatically checking the piece when your turn starts, in that case, it's just a stalemate as each king is checking the other at the start of the turn and ending the turn.
Third rule is just promotion but for all pieces. This is just saying "and everything becomes a queen".
Fourth rule is just a more relaxed version of castling.
Fifth rule is to just get new pieces on the board, because otherwise, the game ends in a draw. No one is going to willingly put their king next to the other king. Also "starting position" is kind of nebulous. There are 8 of them. Do I get to choose which column to start the pawn on? After that, it's just a race to promotion.
The rule about allowing another turn after check just extends the game. And unless you roll a 1, you should be able to get out of most checkmates.
This is adding more rules, not adding complexity. Every rule is to make the game easier, removing restrictions. The die lets you get around the 1 move per turn rule. Rule 2 is pretty much for decoration. Rule 3 gets you faster promotions. It's about who can get to the opposite row first. Rule 4 makes castling easier. Rule 5 is about not wanting a draw. Because with Rule 1, sometimes the king can take a queen with no assistance. This is a game the creator thinks is brilliant and thinks shows how smart they are because they are virtually undefeated because all of their opponents eventually get tired of playing because it's just so tedious.
It's like all the rules added to Monopoly. They're all to make the game "more fair" or "better", but all they wind up doing is making the game take longer because no one wins.
I think you would have to. If the location is predictable, my king would be next to the place that pawn spawns at, ready to take it.
If you can choose the column, my king would be in one of the four center fields, and still would win the race to take it, but if you’re smart, you place one in column A first, force me to run there, and then place one in column H.
On the other hand, once you’re on the last row, you can spawn a new pawn every second move, but so, likely, can I. This might be interesting to analyze.
I'm probably an elitist board gaming snob, but I prefer games that have a lot of player agency and as little luck involved as possible. Chess, Go, Diplomacy (though you may lose some friends), and Scythe (which has some instances of luck, but has mitigation mechanics) all come to mind. Granted most popular games will have elements of luck because it can add to replay-ability.
So we're playing this version, down to just two kings, I roll a 4 and move from E6 to E2. If you're at G3, and you roll at least a two, you can move over to E3 and capture me en-passant. Or at least that's my understanding of the rule. You moved into a square my king was occupying in the turn[s] immediately following mine.
Also easy to circumvent by moving along diagonals. You can even zig-zag your move so you can wind up where you want. I could go E6-D5-C4-D3-E2, then you couldn't en passant to E3. Not that you could do it on E3 as that would put you in check and isn't allowed. But G4 to E4 is a legal move with the same outcome in your scenario.
I really can't see a way that you'd be able to en passant a king that's not easily routed around or just illegal.
It also violates the concept that you're taking multiple turns. You can capture a pawn en passant because the pawn's double move is a relatively recent rule. It's solely to make sure you can't avoid capture by using the double move. But it's still a single turn.
The die roll lets you move that many pieces. As N distinct turns. If the turns would have played out one-by-one, it wouldn't be allowed as a player can't put their own king in check, and even if they were allowed, the opposing player could just take the king in response.
And it's no longer "in passing" if it's from several columns away.
I agree that some things need to be clarified, but that's part of the fun. You are correct that this does point out the difficulty in converting home-brew to a formalized game. However, that doesn't make it nonsense. Just think of it as a good starting point.
Players can make more than one move:
"Each player rolls the die, and the number is the amount of turns each player has."
For pawns, en-pessant means "a pawn may, during the move immediately following another pawn's move, capture another pawn that has chosen to move two spaces in one move as if it had only moved one space." I think for kings you would like to say "a king may, during the sequence of many consecutive moves by the same player, capture another king that immediately before has made many moves in a row by attacking a space it moved into in one of those moves but no longer occupies."
The king moves two squares in both directions (you have two kings now) and the rooks move to the other sides of the kings, so you finally have KR_RK where you had __K__ before.
> Each player rolls the die, and the number is the amount of turns each player has.
I'll have to think about this. My knee-jerk reaction was to call this "absolutely ridiculous". It may hold some potential upon further thought.
I'm not sure, but my gut feeling is that every roll above 3 and maybe even equal to 3 is an immediate checkmate or at the very least a crushing advantage. Like, rolling a 4 on the first move wins the game, rolling a 3 wins the queen, ... that much tempo is devastating.
However, it does remind me of a rather funny chess variant. In that variant, each player has three D6 and each face value corresponds to a piece - 1 for a pawn, 2 for a knight, and so on. Each turn, you roll your 3 dice and you can make one move with either of the pieces you rolled.
This ends up being pretty instructive, because you really have to activate all pieces because you might not roll your most active pieces on a turn.
No, that and your checkmate concerns are almost certainly why they came up with this rule:
“The rest of a piece's moves are forfeited if a check is obtained.”
So you cannot move and strike the King is the same moveset, and your opponent will have 1-4 moves to counter/flee.
There is no check there until checkmate is delivered.
If the enemy is then allowed to play 4 moves to capture the queen while the king is in check then that implies illegal moves are allowed in the intermediate moves.
But if illegal moves are allowed then white can open with 1. Qxd8 Qxa8 Qxh8 Qd1 because once illegal moves are allowed then the whole game devolves a step further.
Accurately encoding the rules of games in a manner that does not allow for loopholes is a really hard problem. Just look at golf. A simple game in which you hit a ball into a hole in the shortest time yet the "official" (R&A) rules run to 230+ pages and has frequent updates to fix issues.
Cricket appears to be a far more complex game yet the laws of cricket as published by Wisden actually comes in at a slightly shorter 208 pages.
Technically the "fewest number of strokes" rather than "the shortest time", I think?
(apologies if there's a speed-golfing community)
Seems simple enough to define illegal moves as moves that end your turn in check, which is basically the same definition as regular chess. I don't immediately see the problem there.
> if illegal moves are allowed then white can open with 1. Qxd8 Qxa8 Qxh8 Qd1
This isn't the same thing at all...
> No piece can be moved that will either expose the king of the same colour to check or leave that king in check.
And you're right that you can re-write that rule, but my point is that it needs to actually be done here, which it hasn't been.
I'm not trying to shit on these rules, I'm just highlighting the difficulty in actually writing consistent rules.
The rules could certainly be written out in more legalese, but I found them easy to understand as-is without resorting to suggesting that the queen could also start ignoring and moving through pieces at will.
Three moves are generally crushing and four is totally unplayable. There aren't many positions where four moves for your opponent won't get you checkmated.
There is general chess advice of "Give you opponent three free moves, what would they do?"
But even that advice implies those moves would be sensible moves, i.e. not just hang pieces in the intermediate moves.
Perhaps if pieces couldn't move en-prise in the intermediate moves it would be improved but I think 3 or 4 moves would still be crushing.
Even a single tempo loss is a big concession, to the point where in some opening lines players will happily sacrifice a pawn to be a tempo up with a good attack (e.g. Smith-Morra).
It feels like there are missing rules about not being able to capture in intermediate moves (or a capture ending the whole turn). Given 4 moves a queen could trivially capture three enemy pawns/pieces then move to a safe square. Even just capturing two pieces and moving to safety would be a decisive advantage.
That advantage is held in check, so to speak, by the check limited turns. Once a piece has put an opponent in check, it can't move again. Other pieces cannot put the opponent in check on the same move. That still creates the possibility of checkmate in one turn, but remember that the opponent will likely also get multiple moves to get out of the situation. Assuming that the in-check player can use all of their moves to get out of check, they might get 3 or 4 moves with which they can wipe out the advantage gained by the other player on the previous move.
Of course, if the in-check player only happens to get one move then it is probably over. Basically, this injects a significant level of chance into gameplay and it speeds up the game. Its really a different game. The more I think about it the more interesting it becomes.
To make it more even handed and less dependent upon chance, it could be done with only 2-3-4 move turns. Being allowed only a single move after an opponent had 4 moves is a disaster. Or maybe a limit on the delta between move counts for successive turns.
Think of it the other way - some people find it fun just by throwing the dice in turns and whoever has the larger number wins. In this case, there's even a chance for whoever has the huge disadvantage (unlucky) to make a comeback. In cases where it's fatal, either those are added as exceptions e.g. re-roll, or accepted as auto-win. Not unlike some gambling games.
My friends and I had fun adding different rules to existing way of playing various games. We might find out later on that the rule might be incomprehensive, which we could either discard or adjust. It might also never be perfectly balanced. Either way we definitely had fun.
I take the article as more of a "story sharing" than a "new specification" for chess.
It seems like the intention of the article was to share the rules. As such, we should be able to discuss those rules. And this person would like to know the reasoning behind the rules as that does give insight. Maybe the rule is counter to the actual goal of the rule and would be better served by another rule. Or to get rid of it entirely.
Because even chess hasn't always been chess. Chess has been developed over years and settled into its state after a lot of refinements.
"It's for fun" is a thought terminating phrase.
I just didn't appreciate the guy's discussion terminating quip.
“I keep getting tails and you keep getting heads, this sucks” is still a problem but it’s not going to be quite as bad as “dude I never even got to move and you won, let’s play something else”.
Also quite strange that you can't quit until there are 3 pieces per player left. How is that supposed to be enforced? Domestic violence or something?
when you move a piece, you can move it to any and all possible squares at the same time - your piece is on all of the squares you've placed it, so in your opponent's next move they can eliminate your piece by attacking any of the positions it's currently in.
In your own next move, you can move the piece from any of the positions it's currently in and place it in a new set of positions.
Eliminating or moving a piece removes it from all positions it's currently in.
Interestingly enough, the only common rule amongst all the different versions of Chess (since it changed depending on where you lived) was that the pawn always went one space.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Sultan-Khan-Servant-Champion-British/...
Why wouldn't you just flip the coin and be done with it? The simplest procedure that produces a 50% probability is best; why invent a complicated protocol that is equivalent to a coin toss and possibly includes one.
Or, for that matter, to avoid the proliferation of random devices, why not treat a four-sided-die as a coin for the purposes of determining who goes first. 1 or 2, first is you; 4 or 3, it goes to me.
Does this mean that if I am put in check, regardless of what I roll on the die, my king must be out of danger after my first move?
Edit: No it does not make much sense. Re-read the rules. I'll be the old grump who prefers the old vanilla boring rules.
I like to play Stockfish, with the playing level set so I win or lose about half the time.
For dice games, Backgammon is just about a perfect game, and skill matters.
A game can have random elements and still be "perfect". Because his perfect game may be a game where he can lose due to variance. There is something to seeing if you can play around variance. That way there's always a way the game can be challenging.
Unlike games with perfect information and no variance. Those games can be completely solved (given enough resources). And I think that's what you're thinking of, games with perfect information.