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Comment by tetha | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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Oh absolutely, just 1 or 2 moves would be more than enough to really shake things up and make players far more defensive.

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.

>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.

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.

> Like, rolling a 4 on the first move wins the game

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.

1. e4 2. Bc4 3. Qf3 4. Qxf7 (or the same with turns 2 and 3 reversed, the final move can also be the bishop) wins with the first check being a checkmate.

E4 Bc4 Qf3 Qf7#

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.

> you hit a ball into a hole in the shortest time

Technically the "fewest number of strokes" rather than "the shortest time", I think?

(apologies if there's a speed-golfing community)

There is, with each stroke counting for 60 seconds (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_golf)

> that implies illegal moves are allowed in the intermediate moves

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...

But the rule in chess is actually:

> 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.

Right, I didn't say the rule in chess was exactly that, but "basically" that - which effectively is the same.

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.

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