Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 06:43:13 01/07/04
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On January 07, 2004 at 08:40:50, Michel Langeveld wrote: >Hello all, > >Somehow I like the Gothic Chess variation of Ed Trice. Not because of the money >but because this is a thinking game a la Chess but complexer as plain chess. I >like it more as FRC because there are 2 new pieces and the board, and the board >is bigger. Hi Michel, I have similar interests. Like you, I am not very interested in FRC, which makes the existing body of opening theory (which, to me, is an important and interesting part of the culture and history of chess) almost irrelevant without adding anything substantially new to the game. Unusual board shapes and pieces are much more interesting. But in my opinion, Gothic Chess, though clearly an interesting game, is not the most interesting chess variant out there. These days, I am adding support for Glinski's hexagonal chess (see http://www.chessvariants.com/hexagonal.dir/hexagonal.html) to Gothmog. This is an extremely fascinating game, tactically more rich and challenging than normal chess, and where the different geometry of the board presents entirely new and challenging problems to the players. I use a straightforward extension of the xboard protocol when adding hexagonal support. I have simply extended the list of variants to include "glinski", and use normal SAN or coordinate notation (there is already a standardized notation for hexagonal chess) to communicate the moves. It is also straightforward to extend the "setboard" command to the new board, although I haven't done so yet. Of course I agree that it would be nice to see support for unusual pieces and board shapes in the popular GUIs, but I'm afraid it is too much to hope for. I'm writing my own xboard-compatible GUI with square and hexagonal boards for Gothmog, but unfortunately it will only run in Mac OS X. Tord
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