

Singularity Chess - iamwil
http://abstractstrategygames.blogspot.com/2010/10/singularity-chess.html

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dhx
Some further information on this chess variant from a 2006 blog post:

[http://pmburgess.blogspot.com.au/2006/06/singularity-
chess.h...](http://pmburgess.blogspot.com.au/2006/06/singularity-chess.html)

~~~
blahedo
In fact, the text of the 2010 post appears to be almost entirely lifted
(without attribution!) from this 2006 post you cite. The wood-inlay board is
very nice but the design of the illustrations appears to be lifted from the
earlier post as well.

~~~
cgmorton
This sheds some light on this comment about the pawns: '(Move "forward"
indicated in white.)' The 2006 picture has white lines and this new one
doesn't.

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simonsarris
The board looks neat but this concept seems only half baked, since it begins
to confuse directionality once a turn is taken, and the new board greatly
reduces the number of available moves.

There is just a single space for the pawns on the end to move to, after all,
and it isn't well defined what moves the penultimate pawns could make should
they move one square forward (can they attack end-pawns that have moved just
one square?)

What might be a better variant would be to assign directionality to all pawns
(starting as forward), and allow them to take left or right turns, perhaps
diagonally. This greatly increases the number of game possibilities while
introducing no new confusing scenarios.

~~~
jquery
A couple other ideas: don't hack the pawn moves, just change the promotion
rules to allow for promotion on either side of the board. Or, don't hack the
pawn moves and don't change the promotion rules. If a pawn gets stuck on its
own side of the board, the pawn acts as a blockade but runs out of moves. This
means the only way to promote is to capture an opponent's piece.

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reitzensteinm
One of the side projects I'm pondering is a multiplayer chess variations site,
with an engine flexible enough to handle modes like this (and 4 player, etc).

A different variation would be promoted weekly, but you'd be able to play any
of them whenever via email or real time.

Would that interest anyone here?

There is a great library of them here, except it's single player only which
IMO takes a lot of the fun out of it:

<http://www.pathguy.com/chess/ChessVar.htm>

~~~
romland
To kill some time many years back we wrote a 32-player "chess" game. We had
some slightly modified rules, most notably anyone can move themselves whenever
they want to and "killing" the king was a matter of checking him for a
specified amount of time (say, 10-15 seconds). It was still black vs white.

The game turned out to be very fast paced, to the point where we had to add
measures to slow it down. :)

As I recall, it was written with the "board" as a separate entity from the
pieces. The board contained the game-rules, for instance whether it was turn-
based or not. Now, this is what got me thinking... The platform we used, allow
for live recompiling and upgrading of objects -- so we indeed did go in and
change the rules even as a game was running (which was kind of fun, just to
mess with peoples heads). But I do think perhaps that could be a nice twist to
have as a "service" as well -- the ability for people to design their own
chess-rules by giving them a framework (like, standard board, standard knight,
pawn etc). Naturally saved online, for public scrutiny. :)

It would be be fun to see what people came up with. The target group for this
may be somewhat limited. :-)

A friend has a version of what we made hosted on his personal site, but I'm
afraid to link to it because it'll probably bring down his server. Throw me a
mail if you want the link.

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PostOnce
Reminds me of a card game that augments chess called Knightmare Chess, out of
print now but not hard to find:
<http://www.sjgames.com/general/outofprint.html>

Each player gets a deck of cards which change the rules of chess, for example,
you can play a card that makes the board cylindrical, so the edges wrap, and
you can move pieces from one side to the next, or another card that allows the
king to move two spaces at a time, etc. I always thought it was a neat game.

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oofabz
Looks pretty cool but the pawn rules are a hack. Since "forward" is no longer
a well defined direction, I propose allowing pawns to move to any adjacent
square, and capture to any diagonal square.

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anigbrowl
There's only one chess variant that's more interesting than the original:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess)>

~~~
mightybyte
I also reject this claim and augment the mention of bughouse with crazyhouse,
which is basically a two-player version of bughouse:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazyhouse>

Crazyhouse has a much higher branching factor than regular chess, and because
dead pieces come back onto the board, the game cannot be attacked with endgame
tables.

I also personally find suicide chess and atomic chess quite interesting. I
can't make the claim that they are more interesting than the original, but
they do require delightfully interesting changes in mentality. And endgame
analysis in each of these variants is vastly different from regular chess with
some beautiful patterns.

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iamwil
I wonder how this changes up the nature of openings. I don't know too much
about chess openings, but usually it seems lik you want to control the center.
But in this case, it seems like all roads lead to the center, so would it be
wise to have pieces sitting there?

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mck-
Any piece that crosses the Event Horizon (I'd say from B4 to G4) would get
torn apart under its own gravity and just disappear into nothingness. Although
from the piece's perspective, time would come to a standstill? Now how about
that...

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philh
An interesting aspect of the pawn movement is that a pawn on a semicircular
square can capture, but not be captured by, a pawn on the semicircular square
directly rimwards. In normal chess, all threats between equivalent pieces are
mutual. (Well, except for the en passent rule.)

I think I agree with the others saying pawn movement is hacky. I'd be inclined
to say that a pawn promotes when it reaches either side of the board, but this
isn't great because you need to keep track of where a pawn started to know
which direction it's going.

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radarsat1
It would be cool to have an engine that supports multi-rule chess AI. I've
always wanted to get around to writing an AI for Laser Chess [1] for instance,
but it seems to me that since it's basically a search strategy, if you
generalized the rules you could easily write an AI that can play any set of
rules.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_Chess>

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NHQ
I made this with the goal of eventually incorporating other boards and
variations. Currently there are 3 options (click on GAME): Standard, Fischer-
random (960), and a 7x7 board with no queens. <http://chessfoo.com>

~~~
mck-
quite a challenge to implement the singularity mode ;)

~~~
jchavannes
Here's a CSS example of a board: <http://socketgaming.com/singularity-chess-
css/>

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perlgeek
Is it still an interesting game to play?

Don't get me wrong, it sounds interesting, but with such games you usually
only know for sure once you've tried it.

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j2kun
I love the idea! I want to try playing :)

But "Singularity Chess" is an awkward name. The center of the board is not a
singularity in any reasonable sense of the word. The space of allowable
movement trajectories appears to be nonsingular.

Maybe a more correct name, albeit drier, would be quadratic chess (because the
transformation looks like a quadratic form).

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colanderman
Why does black have only 7 pawns?

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cmccabe
"... a rook's pawn still on its original square could capture the opposing
rook's pawn on its original square— not sure whether that should be permitted
or disallowed."

It was at this point that I stopped taking this chess variant seriously.

