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Comment by xnorswap | Hacker News Reader

Very few of these rules make sense without more clarifying rules.

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.

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It is for fun. If any thing needs to be clarified, you and your opponent make a decision and then play the game. Maybe you do multiple games using different variants and see what works best. I don't think the author is proposing a new game standard. They are just trying to describe a variant that they found enjoyable.

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.

With a 4 sided die, the game will end on the first turn about 6% of the time. The Scholar's mate takes 4 moves. And if the other player rolls a 1, then it's a win for white.

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.

This assessment is exactly what went through my brain when reading the list. It's great if it's fun for the author and their gaming partner, but I, for one, would never play this. It's way too ambiguous and adds chance in a game that is designed not to have chance in the game (aside from who plays white).

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.

> Also "starting position" is kind of nebulous. There are 8 of them. Do I get to choose which column to start the pawn on?

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 think the en-passant rule is a bit more clever than you're giving it credit for. At the root of en-passant is that a pawn moving into the space the opposing pawn "skipped" allows you to take it, but only if done immediately.

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.

That just seems... bad.

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 but not for the reasons you’ve stated. The rules you have complaints about seem to have straightforward interpretations.

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?

I thought the castling section meant, not that they could castle multiple times, but that unlike normal chess they could still castle after moving the king as long as it remained in the home row.

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

Sorry, I meant b8 not a7.

> Never-mind the impossibility of Kings playing en-passant,

Players can make more than one move:

"Each player rolls the die, and the number is the amount of turns each player has."

Can you explain your interpretation of the rule so that other people who think it means something can compare notes?

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."

> What does it mean to castle with both rooks? Is that a typo for "either"?

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.

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