to Fencer:
but not to forget: it must be possible to enter a king's move from and to his square, because there exist castlings, where the king's position keeps unchanged thought the castling is a king's move.

Sumerian: Yes, I know. I've found the rules.

Bughouselinks:
>http://www.bughouse.info/

http://www.thebugboard.net/

Live-play is possible at
>http://www.uschesslive.org/dojo/25/v.jsp?p=/home


but you need there four players online at the same time...

redsales: I am always pining for Alice Chess.

The challenge is a deep one.

Tandem chess is good, as is Hostage Chess. The "Drop Chess" games make for strong initiatives, and the playing field is levelled a bit. Hostage keeps the forces more equal; Tandem Chess forces the opponent who makes mistakes to pay for them in pieces. Hostage Chess keeps all the pieces (possibly) able to be in play. Either would be good--both would be better!

Fencer: How about a King move to the square with the Rook you want to castle with? Since the King can't capture a rook of it's own color, this could be the signal a player wants to castle. If its legal for the King to castle with that particular rook, the engine should proceed and castle, otherwise an error message of illegal castling. Just an idea...

jcarrillovii: Yes, it is a good idea too. Thanks.

How about the oldest chess game chaturanga .

Nightstorm: Probably it is better to play Shatranj
as Chaturanga rules are not exactly known. Some historicans even doubt at all if chaturanga really existed.

I played several games of Shatranj against ChessV and it is quite interesting. The only problem is that games are usually very long, probably twice as long as in chess.

Hiyya all. I think one very interesting addition to the site can be Darrk Cylinder chess.

I can already see how fast and challenging the games can be.

What do others think?

reza: Dark cylinder atomic .... to make it REALLY fast and exciting ! :-D

reza: Fencer had said that he want no intermixtures...Better some new originals.
My personal favourite is now bughouse/tandem as real team variant!

Caissus: I didn't know fencer had said such a thing. In any case, I still think cylinder dark chess or maybe dark cylinder chess will be a very exciting variant. Just an idea!

Pafl: that's not possible to play! lol!
we'll be having all our games finished in 3 moves!

FRC / CRC, that would be the solutions for the current millennium.

Caissus: Team play encourages discussion and exchange of ideas, which is good for players; stronger players teach, which strengthens and verbalizes knowledge--while eager-to-learn players get new information and insight into the board.

Good news. I've just finished the FRC model and also updated the PGN generator for all chess variants supported on BK.
Now I only need to write the FRC rules and upload everything to the site.

to Fencer:
Really good news! Do you know that each FRC position is related to a number from 1 to 960? Shall I send you material about that?

Sumerian: Yes, I know.

But I prefer to use my position generator instead of keeping a database of all positions. Because it can be used for any similar chess variant, e.g. Corner Chess, Fortress Chess, etc.

To Fencer:

I am sure, you will do it right!

to Fencer:
Thank you very much for enabling FRC here!

Would it be to hard to supply the FRC standard position number as e.g. 870 in the PGN file like
[Event "Casual Game 870"] ?
It would also be very helpful to see this number somewhere when the position will be displayed.

Sumerian: Not hard, time consuming.

to Fencer:
Ok, I have learned that such things are not hard for you - fine! When I look at the way how an individual FRC game is constituting now, I have a suggestion again. Because it is essential to Ches960 / FRC, that the two players will get the information on the current position to play very short before the game is started, it might be a good idea to mask the base line of the starting array until the game is accepted or running. But this is only a cosmetic detail not a must have.

Sumerian: It's a common concept of all BK games with a generated position. But, of course, it can be changed globally, so the position would be generated after the invitation is accepted, not before. Or, with less changes to the code, the position wouldn't be shown until the game is started.

Btw, I've also improved the PGN generator to use line breaks before exceeding 80 characters per line. Can you check it please?

to Fencer:
in http://brainking.com/game/ArchivedGame?g=603270 I get longer lines up to 92 chars.

Sumerian: Ah-ha. A small bug. But it's still readable in the pgn software, right?

to Fencer:
SMIRF can read and use it. But Smirf was built very tolerant towards violations of the PGN specification as long as the input will make any sense. Smirf is e.g. able to read notations written down in German instead of English. But there are some GUIs and tools which are very strict concerning PGN. As I told you SMIRF is already satisfied with the current status quo.

Sumerian: I think some other applications can read it too because nobody ever complained about it. But never mind, I've found the bug.

Sumerian: "Fritz 7" has read our game correctly too!

to Caissus:
No wonder about that, it is correct PGN. The problem is the moment, when castlings could or should happen! P.S.: I have written something on FRC-FEN to cover situations, where the Rook with castling rights is not the outermost one. BrainKing is merely encoding starting positions, so it is not relevant here. But if you want to encode even exotic positions with FEN, you will need a tool like Smirf or the FullChess FEN Editor.

to Fencer
have a look at http://brainking.com/game/ShowGame?g=615346

Read the Bug Tracker.

Fencer: Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!!!

I'm glad to see you incorporated my suggestion regarding castling! :-)

I'll anounce this excellent news in our club, and start promoting FRC events in BrainKing immediately!

Thanks again Fencer!

And thanks to Caissus for introducing BraingKing to FRCEC.

Jose Carrillo
FRCEC Moderator
http://frcec.tripod.com/

jcarrillovii: Good. Promote away :-)
Btw, the castling bug is fixed.

How about Mini Chess? The rules are the same as standard chess (though I think I've seen a version where the pawns can't move 2 places at once when on first row) it's just the board that's smaller.
Anyway, should provide some faster games and I'm sure many begginers would be more inclined to play this smaller version.
And from my limited experience it's a good battle ground to train on How-to-avoid-a-stalemate-when-you-have-a-sure-win kind of games :)

How is it solved in real FRC tournaments, is every game provided a different random position? On BrainKing, all games of the same tournament start with the same position.

to Fencer:
As far as I have experienced it (like in the Chess Classic Mainz) the positions are common to all participants for a round and will be published with some minutes before the start of the round because the positions in real live have to be set up manually. Normaly positions would be skipped and redrawn if they already would have occurred during that tournament, but the chance for that is very small.

Sumerian: So what's the result? In a real tournament, one position is generated at the start and then used for all games? Or is it created for each game individually?

to Fencer:
There is one position for one round valid for all participants.

Sumerian: All right, I can leave it as it is.
Btw, what about the Mini Chess? Is it worth adding?

Fencer: I am sceptically

to Fencer:
Well, my answer would for sure be not representative. I avoid Blitz, Bullet and 6x6 board games. I wonder why to start a game without being ready to spend an appropriate amount of time. That is beyond of my understanding. But people are different.

Sumerian, Caissus: Ironically, the Hyper Backgammon (very fast and easy game) happened the third most popular game on BK only a week after its launch. The truth is that MANY people want to play simple and quick games.

Fencer: For these people chess and his variants surely are the false boardgames..

Caissus: Yes, that's true. But it can be made as a side one-hour project when I'll be too tired of making Xiangqi, Shogi etc.

Fencer: I actually use different positions in my FRCEC tournaments.

While there are some positions that are better for one side than the other, its a matter of luck to get a superior position than another one played by someone else in the tournament.

And since there is no standard opening theory in FRC, for us FRC players, one position isn't any better than another. It's a matter of the luck of the draw.

I would make it an option in your tournaments, same opening for all, or random positions everytime.

Make sure though that its not possible to draw randomly the standard chess opening.

jcarrillovii: Why not? The standard chess opening is a valid position as well.

to jcarrillovii:
Even if it was true that the advantage for one side might be greater than in traditional chess, this would not be relevant, because the players have not the time to prepare themself for that starting position. It is very important that starting arrays are drawn or published immediately before the playing time starts to run. And because Chess960 understands itself at a superset of classic chess it would be counter productive to exclude this special starting array number 518.

I also think we should not exclude special positions. And I disbelieve,that there are positions which are especially bad for the one or for the other side. Or can give anybody an example for such a position?