rabbitoid: A great idea. With your game, one will get the feeling of living without the tedious effort of thinking. I wonder whether WhisperzQ's suggestion wouldn't cut off some of the playing thrill though :-)

WhisperzQ:
right, I totally missed that aspect :)

rabbitoid: ... and a further improvement could be the ability to have an "automove" setting which randomly selects a piece to move, then randomly moves it. then you would only need to look in your Message box to see if you won or lost!

How cool is that :)

rabbitoid: What a brilliant idea, though I would have called it "Ludo Chess".

I've invented a new variant, I call it "Fencer random chess". It carries a certain element of luck. The game is played on a 8x8 chessboard, usual pieces, standard starting positions. moves are identical to regular chess, but capture is prohibited, so the number of pieces remains the same throughout the game. Since the captures are eliminated, the usual target which is the enemy king is no longer the object of the game.

So how is the game ended? simple: After each move, A Fencer random generator, at a probability to be determined, posts a message "white has won", "black has won" or, at a lower probability "draw".

The advantages of this variant should be obvious. The strategic calculations, which are so exhausting in the other variants of chess, are greatly reduced here. Anyone can easily master the techniques involved (OK, I have doubts about some members, but you can't have everything)

In my humble opinion, this game should become very popular on this site, in view of the quality of the other recent additions.

Beren the 32nd: A somewhat easier variant (easier in the sense of calculating probabilities) assigns probabilities based on number of pieces that can be moved. For instance, for the first move, 8 pawns and 2 knights can be moved, giving an 80% probability a pawn has to be moved, and a 20% chance of a knight. After 1 e5 c5, white can move 8 pawns, 2 knights, 1 bishop, 1 queen and 1 king, so he has to move a pawn with chance 61.5%, a knight with a 15.4% chance, and there's a 7.7% chance for each of the queen, king and bishop.

Playing a game of Dice Chess at the moment has given me an idea for a new variation "Probability Chess" (better than dice chess I think).
Instead of a simple dice dictating which type of piece you can move, piece probabilities are calculated first, based on how many moves with each type of piece are possible.
For example, for white's first move there are 16 possible pawn moves, 4 knight moves but no others. Based on this Pawn is assigned 80% and Knight is assigned 20%. Then a randomiser determines which type of piece must be moved accordingly.
To illustrate this further, let's look at how a game might proceed. If white must move a Pawn and plays 1 e4, and then black must move a pawn and plays 1 .. c5, then white has 30 possibilities for the 2nd move: 15 pawn moves, 5 knight moves, 5 bishop moves, 4 queen moves and 1 king move. Based on this Pawn is assigned 50%, Knight 16.67%, Bishop 16.67%, Queen 13.33% and King 3.33%. White has a good chance now of being able to develop a piece, but if Pawn is chosen again then white should choose a move that takes into account how this will affect the probabilities of being able to move certain pieces next time. Later in the game you will be affecting your opponents piece probabilities too!
This is where a lot of the skill in this game will be, and what makes it more fascinating than Dice Chess.
Who thinks this sounds like a good game for BrainKing to support?

Fencer: Fine then. The ECV doesn't give more details, but I like it the way the rules are.

AbigailII: Ah, of course you are right, this kind of giving a check is allowed. What I meant was a situation when both kings (none of them made the first move) give a check each other - that would not be allowed.

Fencer: I don't think that regular chess rules actually forbid the king giving check - that would be a redundant rule: in regular chess, the only squares a king can ever attack are the squares directly surrounding it - but since it cannot be next to the opposing king (as it would threaten the square), it cannot give check.

But if giving check is not allowed, I would like to report a bug. In this game I played a move (6... d6) that emptied the diagonal between the kings, and it marked the move as "giving check". I do not know whether my opponent was forced to move his king - but he shouldn't if the king wasn't allowed to give check.

coan.net: Then our memories do agree. It would be worth to check which way the rules were implemented - and which way they should, which is not obvious. I'll see if the Encyclopedia of Chess Variants is more precise than the chessvariants.com entry.

nabla: I don't think you can move your king into check - and you can't move another piece that will in turn put your king in check - so if the system would have let you play e5xd4, then your king would have been in check (and then game over.)

If say your opponents king had already moved (so it is back to it's 1 space at a time mode), then letting your king (in it's queen move mode) check your opponent would have been acceptable.... as long as you don't put your king in danger.

Even though Fencer below says a king can't give check - I could have sworn that it can in this game while still in "queen-move-mode" against a "king-move-mode" king.

Fencer: Are you sure ? In that position : Échecs du Chat de Chester (mangue contre nabla) , my remembrance is that the system did not let me play e5xd4, which I interpreted as normal since the pawn was pinned by the enemy king (my king would be in check by the other king). But if what you say is true, e5xd4 would have been a perfectly valid move.

Or maybe my memory is at fault ?

AbigailII: No and no. The only difference between normal and cheshire cat chess (regarding king moves) is in the king's ability to make the first move as a queen. Only to make a move, nothing else. It still cannot move to an attacked square, cannot give a check, cannot capture opponent's king etc.

Can you give check with the king? Can you take your opponents king with your king? In normal chess, this is impossible, but in CCC, the first time a king moves, it moves as a queen, so it's possible to have a situation where one king has moved, and the other hasn't, threatening the other king.

The rules aren't clear about this; it's not mentioned in the differences with regular chess (that only mentions the king moving like a queen on his first turn), but such a situation is (obviously) not covered by the rules of regular chess.

In case Fencer wants to introduce yet another chess variant: chess-3

Single elimination tournament. 1 win match. 7 days per move and standard vacation. Only rated players.
Eat, eat, eat! (Anti Chess)

joshi tm: I thought there must be a rational explanation, just couldn't see what it was :)

Ok, I think the image sever did'nt load all the pics I really couldn't see the bishop at c8, so I thought there was castle possible.

joshi tm: Since you have completed 211 games of chess I hope that link was the wrong one. You couldn't possibly believe castling was an option in that position.

joshi tm: I'm not a chess expert, but doesn't have to be no pieces in between the king & rook?

Hi people,

in this game: Amazone Schaken (MadMonkey - joshi tm) Brain King refuses me to castle in this move... Why?

coan.net: And maybe turn the landed on square back to a normal square when the Super peice moves away with the Super piece then becoming a regular piece after it moves to the new square?

coan.net: I hope you are aware that Super Chess is something totally different, look here:

http://www.superchess.nl/

While playing a few games of Cheshire Cat Chess, and idea for a variant came to me. I figured I would post it here before I forget. (nothing test, or played in real life) - feel free to comment.

Basically the same as Cheshire Cat Chess - when a piece moves, the space it was at turns red (I think of it as Lava - and normal pieces can no longer land in those spots)

But you can now get a "Super" piece which is allowed to land in the red spaces.

What is a "Super" piece - A Super Piece is any piece on the board that has captured another piece. So as soon as your queen captures any of your opponent pieces, it turns into a "Super" piece (I image it as the same piece with a green glow - like my black rook icon, but maybe with a "S" on it to make it easier to tell it is "Super")

Anyway, at that point, the super piece can land on any space, even the red spaces. The super pieces can be captures just like any other piece.

So, what do people think?

joshi tm: I would also think it would be illegal since C6 is an unavailable space for your opponent to finish there move.

joshi tm:
I think 11.dc it´s a ilegal move because any piece can go to square c6 and if white could play en-passant then the white pawn would go to c6.
You suppose 11.dc is a legal move, then as consecuence black could play 11...bc and a black pawn could land in the square c6.
c6 is closed until the end of the game so 11.dc it´s, in my opinion, a ilegal move.

Just a thought...

If I would play in this game 10: .. c5, is my opponent able to capture en-passant?

Sorry, andreas, I think it was 25 moves: from white's 27th to black's 52nd. Anyway, more than 20, obviously.

about knn+kp or kbp+krp, I know the issue.

About the pawn, I see a problem here as we are not supposed to know what the player played. I do not like the idea of a flag appearing. Personally.

I would even prefer, if it does not make much sense maybe, 50 moves without exchange and without a visible pawn move.