> Each player rolls the die, and the number is the amount of turns each player has.
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.
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.
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.
Technically the "fewest number of strokes" rather than "the shortest time", I think?
(apologies if there's a speed-golfing community)
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Think of it the other way - some people find it fun just by throwing the dice in turns and whoever has the larger number wins. In this case, there's even a chance for whoever has the huge disadvantage (unlucky) to make a comeback. In cases where it's fatal, either those are added as exceptions e.g. re-roll, or accepted as auto-win. Not unlike some gambling games.
My friends and I had fun adding different rules to existing way of playing various games. We might find out later on that the rule might be incomprehensive, which we could either discard or adjust. It might also never be perfectly balanced. Either way we definitely had fun.
I take the article as more of a "story sharing" than a "new specification" for chess.
It seems like the intention of the article was to share the rules. As such, we should be able to discuss those rules. And this person would like to know the reasoning behind the rules as that does give insight. Maybe the rule is counter to the actual goal of the rule and would be better served by another rule. Or to get rid of it entirely.
Because even chess hasn't always been chess. Chess has been developed over years and settled into its state after a lot of refinements.
"It's for fun" is a thought terminating phrase.
I just didn't appreciate the guy's discussion terminating quip.
“I keep getting tails and you keep getting heads, this sucks” is still a problem but it’s not going to be quite as bad as “dude I never even got to move and you won, let’s play something else”.