I still have a set which was sold as "Visual Chess", and you can still find it on eBay for example. The pieces were mostly like traditional design (but kind of "modernized" in 1960s style) but when viewed from the top (i.e. as you play), there was an indication of the allowed move. You can see some examples in the image link below.
Even the pawns had a nice design which clearly indicated that movement of one square forward (normally), or attacking on the diagonal, were both allowed.
I had an updated version of this set (probably from the 90s?). Mine had a better board and I think the tops of the pieces were different, but the text/diagrams were identical:
Nor the "promotion" of a pawn that has marched across the board to begin a new life as... a pawn (or anything else that isn't a king -- this almost means a queen, but a promotion to knight can also be useful).
Displaying usual the moves on the pieces is certainly super-handy for beginners to understand the moves, but as you've pointed out: Chess also has other nuances.
---
I was showing off one night and, at the tail end of an end game, and promoted a pawn to a pawn once it reached the far rank. It didn't really help in that game (although I can envision corner cases where it could be helpful as a blocker, but any other promotion is equally useful a blocker), but I had a move that I could afford to burn and it was fun to do so I did it.
It was a fun game. 10/10, did repeat other fun (and absurd) chess games.
umm. Commendably warped, but I'm not sure that's legal?
(BTW many years ago I experimented creating chess variants, before I even knew it was a thing. I invented a number which all felt contrived, but one actually felt right and an improvement, which is the ability to take your own pieces, as well as the enemy's. Turns out that somebody's already invented it (search for 'self eliminator chess') and they considered it to have potential. The value of it was it allows you to trade off position for pieces. It really changed how the game felt for the better. FYI anyway, YMMV)
> umm. Commendably warped, but I'm not sure that's legal?
Interesting point. Here is what the FIDE handbook says about it (emphasis mine):
“When a pawn reaches the rank furthest from its starting position it must be exchanged as part of the same move on the same square for a new queen, rook, bishop or knight of the same colour. The player’s choice is not restricted to pieces that have been captured previously. This exchange of a pawn for another piece is called ‘promotion’ and the effect of the new piece is immediate.”
Any move is legal in casual play if the person on the other side of the board agrees that is is OK, especially if that game is held in their own house.
I mean: We're not playing ranked games here. It's supposed to be fun, and it was a fun game.
Self eliminator chess sounds like an interesting dynamic. I'll have to check it out. Some of the games where my thinking feels best (if that makes sense) are the games where a ravenous opponent has shewdly eaten most of my pieces.
I'm looking forward to absurd openings that include things like "I'm just going to use my bishop to get own pesky little pawn out of the way."
If chess is a war simulation, then: It seems like it is both brutal and useful to deliberately destroy one's own units.
(It's bad PR, always, but I'm both the PR department and the native public audience. It'll be fine on my side of the board, and it might even frighten the enemy.)
Great! This will be excellent for beginners. I'm considering teaching chess to my kids. Can I still find it online? My searches on Amazon and Google haven't yielded the results I need.
For me the most surprising observation from this thread is this tweet [1] showing that the knight's moves are exactly the squares that the queen can't get to within a 2 square manhattan distance.
You mean a 2-square Chebyshev distance, I think (the Linf norm). A 2-square Manhattan distance (the L1 norm) wouldn't include any of the squares that a knight can get to.
For those that want a visual description there's a blog I serendipitous recently ran into[0]. If you're too lazy to open:
- n-square Chebyshev distance forms concentric squares around your starting point
- n-square Manhattan Distance forms diamonds (meaning up/down/left/right = 1 space away but all diagonals are 2 spaces away)
We could also say the Knight can go everywhere a queen can't in the 3-square Manhattan distance and this might be more useful since it is all points along that boundary except the corners! (We got an in the wild "2 problems in computer science" with an "off by 1" error :)
That's very much a picture that you learn on the usual mathematics route of learning about these things, yes. More generally, there's a fair amount to be said about how you can derive shapes of unit balls from distance functions and vice versa (in functional analysis in particular).
I think, unfortunately, not many get visual descriptions when learning about these topics. To be fair, these visualizations can harm one's intuitions about how the metrics work in higher dimensions, so I can understand arguments against visualization. But in another example, I think even many people can come out of a Linear Algebra class and not understand that a matrix operating on a vector always performs an affine transformation on that vector (yes, I know we can abuse and get other forms but let's keep general due to context).
I think this is something math education can improve on since we are highly visual creatures. But it is always a tough balance since that same tool to help learning can decrease generalization if internalized improperly. But that can also be said about anything and is why I dislike the common test focused paradigm of education. As I think we've been doing it long enough that students have found studying for the test -- as opposed to study for learning -- is optimal. Goodhart always wins lol
> a matrix operating on a vector always performs an affine transformation on that vector
A simple matrix multiplication only performs a linear transformation. To get a nonlinear affine transformation you need to augment the matrix and vector with extra dimensions containing carefully selected extra ones and zeros in addition to the translation. The end result is still a linear transformation of the supplied vector, but looks like an affine transformation if you ignore the final dimension.
But yes, I did not pick that up in linear algebra. It wasn't even mentioned there. All the fun stuff was taught in computer graphics.
Chess would be a more elegant game without the stalemate rule.
(And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot.
So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves, it loses in attacking spirit.)
Extremely strong disagree with this[1], and the obvious question that arises is what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule? Would the other side win? Would the stalemated side pass? Neither seems at all satisfactory.
The non-castling variant was invented by Vladimir Kramnik[2] explored by Deep Mind not on a whim but specifically as part of Vlad's exploration of whether this chess variant would help to revitalise the game given how computer evaluation has affected theory.[3] There were also a couple of no-castling tournaments played, but like chess960[4], opinions were very much divided about whether or not it was actually any kind of improvement.
[1] Even though I pretty much always fall into stalemate traps in blitz.
[2] Former world champion and lately old guy shouting at clouds about cheating
Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check.
I was not talking about the rule that handles games that do not progress. (Though I would perhaps replace that rule with one that just forbids repeating board states, but that was besides the point here.)
So to make chess more elegant in how the rules are formulated (but probably not a better game, mind you), I would suggest removing all special rules around check and checkmate. Just replace it with the rule that you lose when your king gets captured (and obviously, keep Zugzwang).
Sorry, I was not clear that I also wanted to remove special handling of check and checkmate.
(Btw, this feels very similar to the rules against self-sacrifice in Go.)
> Sorry, when I was talking about the stalemate rule, I meant the rule that declares that the game is a draw, if the only move you can make is putting yourself into check.
There is a Chess game that does this. It's Chinese Chess (which is just as old as Western Chess, and has the same origin in India). In Chinese Chess, the objective is to capture (or as the Chinese say, "eat") the king. There is no prohibition against putting your King in check. It works just fine, unless the only pieces left are Kings. The main problem is players doing checks forever or chasing pieces around forever: the rule is that if you do that you lose.
Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past.
> Now stalemate by repeated back-and-forth is a different matter. I would favor some variant of Go's Ko rule, which is that you may not make a move if the result would be a board that looked exactly the same as it had in the past.
I would favour that rule as well, but keep in mind that even in Go that is a very modern formulation / variation of this rule. Past formulations were about as clunky as chess's stalemate rules, and even left some situation (that were extremely rare in practice) without a satisfactory resolution.
Btw, in Go the 'board' isn't the only state the game has: you also count prisoners. After a complicated ko exchange, the board might look the same, but the prisoner count has gone up for both players. I assume the rules probably only care about the difference in prisoner counts (and board state) to determine whether a state has been repeated; not the absolute prisoner count.
I don't know about Japanese rules, which are borderline insane. I use the only rational ones: Chinese rules! As far as I know, in Chinese rules, Ko only considers the board configuration.
This would make the game less elegant, in my view. There are too many endgames that are just trivially winning if you make stalemate a win for the stalemating player.
Stalemate mostly just makes the game more interesting when otherwise the position would be completely uninteresting.
No, you're fundamentally changing the game, not when people resign.
If stalemate is a win, almost any king and pawn vs king position is a win, which means almost every rook or bishop ending up a pawn is a win, which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game. Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Which in turn makes only the most boring openings viable.
Now every game is boring.
Also, in tournament play, finishing your game early just means you have to wait longer until the next round, even in a round robin event. Because chess tournaments pretty much never start a round until the previous round is completely over. Not since adjournments stopped being a thing.
When people complain about chess being uninteresting, they usually complain about too many draws. Adding more opportunities to turn draws into wins/losses might seem like a good thing?
> Now the middle game is less interesting, because taking any kind of risk is never worth it.
Chess is a zero sum game. Taking the right risk can also increase your chances of winning (instead of just stalemating).
(I mention the zero sum game, because eg real life war is not a zero sum game. So it's perfectly possible for certain actions, like starting to shoot medics, to be bad for both parties. But in chess, what's bad for one party is automatically good for the other.)
> [..] which means it's incredibly easy to trade into a winning endgame from the middle game.
You know that the other guy gets to have a vote on this, too?
You can also have a look at the Eastern chess variations (Shogi etc) that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39141452 mentions that don't have check rules, and see whether for them every game is boring?
Btw, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf for an investigation of the impact of no-check-rules on western chess. It doesn't make everything boring.
> Stalemate=win chess has little effect on the opening and middlegame play, mostly affecting the evaluation of certain
endgames. As such, it does not increase decisiveness of the
game by much, as it seems to almost always be possible to defend without relying on stalemate as a drawing resource. Therefore, this chess variant is not likely to be useful for sidestepping known theory or for making the game substantially more decisive at the high level. The overall effect of the change seems to be minor.
This does not seem to support your suggestion that eliminating check rules and ending the game with the capture of the king, would make all games boring.
Personally I find it very entertaining when a player pulls a rabbit out of their hat by turning an obviously worse position into a stalemate by some crazy trick. I think it adds some skill expression to an otherwise boring end game, and gives the losing player something to fight for at the end. Admittedly this is more interesting in a format that results in a time crunch at the end.
According to the paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.04374.pdf) removing the special handling of stalemates did not really change the draw ratio much. So the weaker party can still gun for the draw in most situations.
(However, they had really good computers play, who do not get stressed out, albeit they do make worse moves on shorter time controls.)
> what would you do if a side is in stalemate and there isn't a stalemate rule?
The game keeps going until one side gets too tired and gives up (or makes a mistake that breaks the stalemate).
Another idea would be a "Fortnite rule": after $X turns, the outermost edge of the board kills any pieces left in it (or becomes "the storm" in Fortnite parlance); repeat every $X turns until someone's forced into checkmate because there's only a 2×2 square left and nowhere else for the kings to go except within each others' attack range.
What do you mean the game keeps on going? One side has to move but has no legal moves.
That's what I was asking - do they get to "pass" and the other side gets to move? This is how it works in the game of go for instance. In chess that would be more or less equivalent to the non-stalemated player winning, because in many stalemate positions if you had an extra move you could checkmate.
The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so much so that he now has a particular type of stalemate trap named after him.[2]
I'm not seriously entertaining your Fortnite rule. That is such a radical departure from the game of chess as not to be the same at all, so you could have that as a chess variant or whatever but it's fundamentally a different game.
> What do you mean the game keeps on going? One side has to move but has no legal moves.
As said elsewhere, I would suggest removing rules against putting yourself in check.
> The stalemate rule adds something that the attacking player has to keep in mind and gives the defending player something to shoot for - lots of creative and tricky play arises from this, with IM Eric Rosen being the most famous exponent[1] so much so that he now has a particular type of stalemate trap named after him.[2]
That's why I was careful in saying that the proposed change would make the rules more elegant, less clunky. I did not say anything about this making chess a better game. Sometimes adding weird corner cases to your rules can make the game better.
Just look at all the weird rules that you can find in Skat or Doppelkopf. (Though Mü is an example of a game with much cleaner rules that captures a similar spirit.)
Yes, you are right that this is only an intellectual exercise. (Btw, it's quite popular in the Go world to reformulate the ancient clunky rules of Go into a more modern, mathematical version that might or might not have small differences in gameplay.)
However, I don't actually think that removing check rules make chess worse. But that's subject to experiment.
If you run out of legal moves then that seems like an outright loss condition, no? My understanding of "stalemate" is when you can move but there's no way to actually force a win (e.g. kings chasing each other around the board). I ain't a chess expert, so maybe I'm using the wrong terminology.
No. In ordinary usage "stalemate" means when people are kind of stuck and not making progress, but in chess stalemate specifically means when one side has no legal moves but is not in check. In chess that is a draw. The type of situations you're describing about are covered by four rules.
1. The threefold repetition rule: if a board position repeats 3 times either side may claim a draw. In online chess this is automatic but in over the board chess people may not always realise the position has repeated especially if there is a gap between repetitions.
2. The 50 move rule: if 50 moves pass without a pawn moving or a capture being made then it is a draw.
3. Insufficient material: if neither side has sufficient material to checkmate then it is a draw. In some rule systems [1] it has to be sufficient material to force checkmate in some it's just sufficient material to mate[2] (ie the defending side can blunder into it). So if there are no pawns and both sides just have a lone king, or it is king and knight vs king or king and bishop vs king then it's always a draw. In USCF and chess.com king and 2 knights is a draw in FIDE tournaments or on lichess it's not. King and 2 bishops on up is not a draw because you can force checkmate.
4. Draw by agreement: the two sides can agree a draw. In some tournament situations this is only allowed after a certain move but there are ways the players can deliberately go into some sort of situation which is a known theoretical draw and just repeat 3 times by tacit agreement. Including amusingly/notoriously (depending on your pov) the Carlsen/Nakamura "double bongcloud" game [3]
[1] US Chess federation and chess.com in particular
The important thing to mention: in many respects, you can pretend that in chess the objective is to capture the opposing king. But for historical reasons, the game actually tops one move before, and the king is never captured.
But they also have weird rules that both (A) forbid putting your king in check, and (B) hand you a draw when you are out of legal moves.
A simpler version of chess would actually play until the king is captured, and allow people to move into check.
I do not get this Rosen Trap example you linked to... It's an easy win for blacks, just move the rook to 8th row instead of moving the pawn and it's checkmate. The pawn move seems kind of random, as if it was played by a child.
Generally the attacking side can avoid the stalemate trap but often it happens under time pressure etc so the attacker doesn’t have time to calculate whether the defender has any valid moves.
Then that side loses. If they can't move, it's because any move would put them in check and therefore captured next turn. If they're in that position, they've obviously lost.
Passing makes no sense since it contradicts the rule that says chess players must always make a move during their turns. There is no contradiction with stalemates: since they must make a move and any move puts the king in check, it is hopeless and they lose.
> Neither seems at all satisfactory.
Can't be worse than drawing a game because the clearly beaten opponent can't legally move into a check.
This is an actual strategy. Refuse to resign and try to get the opponent to blunder his pieces into a stalemate in the end game thereby drawing the game. It's asinine but sometimes it actually works, especially at my noobish level.
I dont get it. Queen can do everything a knight can, and then some. How can electing a knight instead of queen can be of any usefulness?
Or do you mean it avoids stalemate by making it harder for the elector to defend/attack, and loose? I dont see any advantage there, isnt stalemate always preffered to loosing?
Promotion generally happens when there are very few pieces on the board, and often the opponent's king is the only piece they can move, and it often is close to the promotion square since it was likely trying to block it.
If the promoting piece can't check but immediately blocks the last movement squares for that king, as a queen may easily accidentally do, the player who has only the king gets a stalemate draw out of a technically lost position.
Sometimes it's tactically crucial that the promotion is a check, and in these cases you might need a knight.
Making a knight to avoid stalemate is actually extremely rare, because very often a knight isn't enough to win. Making a rook is more common there, but even that's rare.
In Chinese chess, the horse behaves like the knight in western chess except that (a) it cannot jump over pieces, and (b) the definition of jumping over is that it first move horizontally/vertically 1 step and then diagonally 1 step. It cannot first move diagonally.
This also leads to situations where two knights can be positioned amongst other pieces such that one knight is able to capture the other but not vice versa.
Most people think of the knight move as one straight and then one diagonal. However, this is still ambiguous. Imagine one up, then one down left for example, resulting in the square left to the original square.
A better description is moving 2 squares straight, not diagonal, into one direction, then moving 1 square into a 90° turned direction.
Both western and Chinese chess knights move to the opposite corner of a 3x2 rectangle.
However in western chess, it doesn't matter what pieces are in the other 4 locations of the 3x2 rectangle.
In Chinese chess, you can only move from A to B if X is unoccupied. The locations marked "-" don't matter if they are occupied or not.
A X -
- - B
A -
X -
- B
- - B
A X -
- A
- X
B -
etc.
Of course, all the other pieces have their own rules as well, so it's a significantly different game. There is no queen, the elephant is sort of like a bishop but must move 2 squares at a time, the cannon moves horizontally and vertically but cannot kill without having exactly one (not zero) piece in-between, the "guards" and king all cannot leave the king's palace which is a 3x3 box, the pawns can move sideways after they cross the river in the middle of the board, etc. Come to think of it the only piece that has the exact same rules are the 2 "chariots" which are positioned in the same place as western rooks and function exactly like western rooks.
Chess players do, yet experience of basically any non-player I have ever heard describing it as "one straight, one diagonal" tells me otherwise. Also "moving two and then one" is ambiguous and would allow moving 3 squares into the same direction.
There was a big discussion of this topic on chess stackexchange[1]. It used to be just universally believed to be true but some modern analysts challenge the idea.
In the image above, imagine a knight on H3, which covers g1, g5. Neither a bishop, a pawn or rook can help that way.
After one move, it can go to f4 where it can add on as a second attacker to the queen on 4 squares. After another move it can go to d3, where it can again cover squares the queen cant (e2,e5).
So I guess its both because it has a lot of alignment in doubling as an attack, and covering nearby squares the queen cannot.
I'm not a master or anything, but I've always found it interesting that the queen is usually thought of as the most powerful piece while I think it's the knight.
Yeah the queen can move everywhere, but she's "predictable". The way a knight moves makes it more difficult to defend against IMO.
A huge difference is that a queen, like a rook, can attack a whole row and column, making it possible to box in an opponent's king. A knight has limited reach and can never attack a square the same colour as the one it is occupying.
Another is that a queen, like a rook, can reach any unblocked square in at most two moves. A Knight can require up to six moves!
Add to this the ability to move and attack diagonally like a bishop, but without the restriction of staying on the same colour of squares...
Knights tend to be overrated at lower levels of playing strength, where their irregular moving pattern is indeed challenging for the players, and as a result, Knight moves often get overlooked.
However, once a player becomes more proficient, not only the obvious superiority of the Queen, but even of the Bishop (other things being equal, Bishops are thought to be actually somewhat more valuable, especially as a pair) starts becoming apparent.
Knights are objectively nowhere near as powerful as queens. However they're underrated in blitz chess, where their visually hard to see moves often catch people unaware.
Even grandmasters fall for knight forks in blitz games quite often.
Knights are prone to getting "trapped". There are limited places a knight can go, so the opponent only has to maintain pressure on those squares. This is the reason why it's generally a bad idea to put a knight near a corner of the board.
"3 squares away" is not entirely obvious though. The definition as it stands is mathematically unambiguous. Obviously, it's not how you teach the rule to a beginner, but that's irrelevant.
If "nearest" is unambiguous then "3 squares away" is also unambiguous. The nearest squares are 1 square away, the ones nearest to those are 2 squares away, etc.
(a) knights' threats are disconnected and this "flower" approach while good is maybe not ideal. You might as well use a hollow circle at that point.
(b) when we say "chess pieces can be redesigned to be..." then I think about actual physical pieces, it would not do to make these as actual physical pieces because an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa. Gotta make the bishop look like it is "sniping" along the diagonals while the rook looks more "sweeping" maybe?
(c) don't make the king a little-queen. Make the king a little square to emphasize "it can only threaten the neighboring square," then it looks more visually distinctive.
I think I'd be inclined to disambiguate them by making the ends of the bishop pointed and the ends of the rook blunt. When moving along a diagonal you're moving in the direction of square corners, vs faces for moving in ranks and files, so it makes sense in that way, and it also evokes the shapes of the classical pieces.
>an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa
This was my first thought too. If the "feet" of all of the pieces were "flat", or parallel to the rows of the board, you could more easily tell their proper orientation.
Speaking of swastikas, that's very close to an Iron Cross.
...anyway so people can see it better, that actual character is a pretty close representation of the knight's movement, it's just a little hard to tell the 2-then-1 distances: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%EA%96%85
It would need 8 arms, not 4. (A well-placed Knight meaningfully controlling all of its 8 target squares is actually referred to as an "octopus Knight" sometimes).
It is also opinionated, in the sense that the vectors for Knight moves is [2, 1] and [1, 2] (whereby in both cases negative numbers can be used)... so whether you visualize a Knight move towards the left top corner as an L (x-1 first, then y-2), or as an ꓶ (y-2 first, then x-1) is an arbitrary decision.
It might be my OCD side coming out, but any design prioritizing one of these perspectives over the equally valid alternative doesn't feel "clean" to me somehow : )
It's been weird/amusing observing how different age groups at my local chess clubs call pieces and concepts. The older group very much stays to the local Dutch terminology for both while the younger group (presumably influenced by youtube) tends to mix Dutch piece names with English concepts. So you can have a koning (king) that is being "skewered" by a koningin (Queen) on the tweede (second) rank.
It is called "Springer" (translates to: jumper) in German. Sometimes "Pferd" or "Ross" is also used (translates to: horse and steed, resp.). That's why "Knight's tour" is called "Springerproblem" or "Rösselsprung" (from "Ross") in German.
When I was younger, I always believed that the proper name was for the knight was "horse" (my primary language is English). I only figured it out when I was playing chess against my friend, and he was like, "horse? wth is that"
I have a fair amount of experience teaching children and adults how to play chess.
I've almost never seen a beginner mess up the basics of how the pieces move(what this piece set displays). Probably 95% of confusion about rules in new players is about the things you mention. Especially en passant and castling rules.
The rule on castling through check is especially confusing, and I've seen even master strength players believe that you can't castle long if b1 or b8 is attacked. Another common mistake is forgetting the rook or king has previously moved.
En passant is also very confusing for beginners because there's no indication of it being possible in the current board state. It depends on the previous ply.
Repetition is also a major footgun in tournament play. It's often referred to as repetition of moves, but it's actually repetition of the position(which is typically reached via repetition of moves, but doesn't have to). And there's a very specific procedure in tournament chess for claiming a repetition. You have to write down your move, stop the clock and call the arbiter without making the move. If you make the move and hit the clock, now your opponent has every right to make another move, creating a new position. The repetition no longer counts when that happens(so you can't claim e.g oh the position repeated a 3rd time 15 moves ago, gimme a draw).
I actually lost a game this way when I had a repetition in a losing position.
But I hate the way the pawns face. Makes sense! But it still reads, to me, like one of those "color, but the text is in a different color" things. Feels like the pawns should be facing the opposite direction. =/
It would be interesting to do an experiment on people playing one another (online) with these pieces vs regular pieces (e.g. one player with a regular set and one player with this set). Because I do feel like I can visualize the state of the board more easily with this approach--but would that translate across people into better play, or is there some point where a more expert player (I don't play very often, though I enjoy playing and have played for years) has already internalized the mapping from piece shape to movement. But that said, it does feel like the difference between font styles in programming, which for me have a very meaningful impact over time.
Edit: Though good point to the parallel commenters, the knight shape is harder to differentiate and kind of throws me off. But maybe tweaks there.
If you're ever going to get the point where you recognize tactics (or anything, for that matter) on the board, how the pieces move must already be internalized and not require any thought. People even especially practice visualizing knight journeys between arbitrary squares to make this more automatic.
If you ask an experienced player to use a weird piece set, you will only be introducing error and cognitive overhead. If you ask someone naive to the game to use the piece set, do they internalize how the pieces move more quickly and get over the impedance when they start to use a normal set?
Going at a tangent to your idea, maybe it is possible to construct a set that aids the performance of a naive player, but which degrades the performance of a more experienced opponent. Could that handicap be as great as a club player offering pawn odds against a naive opponent?
Exactly this. Relatives have been trying to choose "fancy-looking" chess sets for me as a gift, and I always hated them. I don't want fancy pieces, I want the standard ones that don't give me cognitive overhead :-).
"Tournament chessboards" are my favourites, obviously.
There are flat chess pieces that have the traditional 2D symbols on top. Another question is whether anyone makes 3D knight pieces that are designed to lay flat on the board. Such pieces would fit a "Godfather" themed chess set rather well...
>Going at a tangent to your idea, maybe it is possible to construct a set that aids the performance of a naive player, but which degrades the performance of a more experienced opponent. Could that handicap be as great as a club player offering pawn odds against a naive opponent?
> has already internalized the mapping from piece shape to movement
Magnus Carlson, considered one of - if not the - best chess players of all time has a famous video of him playing three chess matches simultaneously, blindfolded, and winning all three.
Once you get to a certain point not only the movements but also entire gameplay strategies become internalized.
Not to mention the video where the board is presented in the "wrong" direction, so he enumerates to himself which squares the pieces are on, then closes his eyes so he can see the board clearer.
The more impressive one is where he's matched up against 10 Harvard Law students simultaneously, and is blindfolded. He won all of the games handily.
Even more impressive, one of the students asked Magnus if he could sign a chess board. Not only did Magnus sign an autograph, he literally annotated the entire game from memory. That is insane to me.
Except that this set describes the attack directions, not the motion directions. The difference is in the shape of the pawns. I think this one is quite interesting, as showing lines of threat.
I thought this would be about redesigning their movement to make a new kind of game. But it's only the shape of the pieces.
That said, I'd use a square for the rooks so they don't get confused with the bishops as they get moved and maybe an L shape for the knights. It would definitely make it easy for beginners to learn how each piece moves.
> It would definitely make it easy for beginners to learn how each piece moves.
Which is more or less the easiest part of the game to learn, and one which pretty much anybody will have down after one or maybe two games.
It's a clever little idea to share on Twitter but in practice I think it would make the board slower to read for advanced players, because so many pieces look similar.
Exactly, this will reduce readability of a board. It's like highlighting the black key notes on sheet music. You think you're making it easier, but end up just adding too much redundant info and it clutters the page. Or like adding a ton of crufty comments to code ("// this is a loop that ... "). Or like adding a "fill these. with water" post-it notes on an icecube tray. Clever. But worse.
If each movement is broken into a piecemeal function, then a non-standard piece could be assembled, such as a piece that moves like a knight in 3 directions and a bishop northwest and southwest.
Recognizing the pieces is the easiest part of chess. And distinct symbolic forms are actually easier than representational forms like these. Similarly, iconic phonetic notation not a good replacement for the Latin alphabet
And the idea is misguided there as well. Kanji are problematic because people who can't read them can't differentiate their shapes. Any unique silhouette -- even a Latin letter -- is preferable to arrow diagrams, which end up unnecessarily similar to one another.
Several years ago, I wrote a chess-like game where the shape of the pieces showed their potential moves (https://github.com/scottlilly/mogrichess). This was needed because the a capturing piece gained the movement abilities of the piece it could capture, so pieces' movement abilities were always changing.
Unfortunately, I never got around to writing a good AI so you could play against the computer. At some point, I'd like to get back to that project.
Does it take anyone longer than a game or two to remember the rules of chess? I even taught chess to adults as a child and they caught on within a few moves. Which I guess explains why it remains more popular than FOTM overcomplicated board game #5000. It's not difficult to memorize. IMO this is a solution to a nonexistent problem.
Knowing the rules and 'seeing' the ways that pieces can move are different things. I could see this being helpful to someone who has a working knowledge of the ways pieces can move, but hasn't yet built their skill of visualization thereof.
So we should delay the development of their visualization skill, because otherwise visualization is useless in chess? This works literally against what chess is about and materializes the least complex aspect of the game into a visual noise all over the board.
Except this doesn't help you visualize it either. I can understand this argument for online boards that, when you click on a piece, highlight all the legal moves. This set doesn't do that, it basically just reminds you how the pieces move.
I don't think anyone that actually plays or teaches chess thinks this is a good set design. Honestly amazed by how many people called this clever. I also find it weird that OP claims it makes the board "easier to probe", when it does the exact opposite. This is a textbook example of making up a problem, rather than a solution.
(To be clear, its much older than 741 years, but the way the board is crystal clear and instantly recognisable in that illustration is really striking)
What I enjoy about this design is it exploits the correlation between piece value with the number of ways it can move, resulting in a visual intuition that more visually complex pieces are worth more on average. The knight is perhaps the frustrating exceptions to this.
Piece value is determined by how many squares it can threaten.
This is why rooks are worth 5 and bishops are worth 3, despite both having apparently equal freedom of movement (just rotated 45 degrees). The bishop will be able to access strictly fewer squares than the rook even in the best case, and usually much fewer. And the bishop is stuck on one color.
Actually the numbers 5 and 3 are not derived from the number of squares attacked.
They denote the power of pieces in relation to eachother, as a general rule with lots of exceptions, and reflects many material imbalances that are often comparable in strength(usually in the endgame). The unit of measurement here is the material value of a single pawn.
3(3x1) pawns are often enough compensation for for a knight(3) or a bishop(3 + ε).
3 minor pieces(3×3) are often sufficient compensation for a queen(9).
One minor piece and 2 pawns(3+2) are often sufficient for a rook(5).
Two rooks(2x5) are typically slightly stronger than a queen(9).
Two minor pieces(2x3) are typically slightly stronger than a rook(5).
There are different systems that are derived from number of squares attacked. One thing to note about these systems is that pawns are not created equal. Rook pawns attack one squares less than other pawns, for instance.
"This is why rooks are worth 5 and bishops are worth 3"
Such evaluations are only a rule of thumb intended for beginners.
It's all context dependent. There are positions where a Bishop is more powerful than a Rook. Other things being equal, Bishops tend to be preferred over Knights in serious play (especially when you've got a Bishop pair, which is synergically more powerful than one Bishop times two), even though both are theoretically "worth" 3 pawns. Two minor pieces are usually worth more than a Rook and a pawn, and more often than not it isn't a good idea to exchange the former for the latter, even though the total value appears the same (3+3 = 5+1). And so on.
At least at the level I play at, knights are invaluable because of their ability to jump over walls and threaten multiple pieces at the same time - they're the piece most likely to create a successful fork (threatening two pieces of value at the same time, likely forcing your opponent to pick which thing they're more willing to lose)
The ones with square tops only move horizontally/vertically and the bigger ones move further, the ones with an L-shaped top move in an L shape, the ones with a diagonal top move diagonally. I don't see the King and Queen movements though.
I like it, but the knights still aren't quite right. And I'd probably give all of them square bases, so that the bishop and rooks weren't so easily mistakable with just a 45° turn.
What I find funny about chess it's such an elegantly designed game... except castling. Always seemed like a random thing to me to be in the game, and then I found out that it was added centuries after in medieval europe to the game, makes sense why it feels so out of place.
Wish we had a league without castling for that sole purpose.
No-castling variant is a thing. It generally makes taking the King to safety more difficult, encouraging a more aggressive style (in the spirit of "I'll get to yours before you get to mine").
Kramnik revived the idea during his collaboration with DeepMind (where he tested several chess variants, revolving around only minor, albeit impactful adjustments to the ruleset).
One potential problem with no castling is that players may end up castling "manually", which takes several moves and becomes a mundane "housekeeping" task, actually sucking some dynamics out of the game. That was probably the reason why it was invented in the first place, to sort of automate the obvious thing away.
By the way, European chess added much more to the original version beyond just castling. The Queen would originally move in the same manner as the King (only by one square), the "mad Queen" thing is a European invention. So is the pawns' ability to move forward by 2 squares from their initial position. (And I'm guessing the incentive for that was of similar nature as above - to speed the game up).
It’s interesting how people react to these designs. For me, I actually find them more confusing than the actual piece shapes, probably because I have the symbols of knight, rook, etc. burned into my mind from playing chess for thousands of hours as a kid. But it could also be because the geometric shapes are too abstract and lack character, which makes them harder to distinguish from each other.
It brings to mind the idea that everything is ultimately a representation, even the things designed to be as straightforward as possible.
Lichess also includes a piece set similar to this, although with the notable difference that the Knight is shaped like a greater-than symbol and the pawn is a small square.
You can also design the pieces like humans that fight each other in long unskippable animations each time a piece is captured. (Does anyone remember Battle Chess?)
This is cool! The major online chess sites should add this as an option.
The lines don't need to be so thick I think, which would allow little arrow heads to make it even more obvious. And while we're at it, they don't even need to look like actual physical pieces, so the knight could be designed to show how it hops over squares by having blank spots in its icon.
Much like this chess set from 1975 [1].
We picked it up from an auction house about 6years ago, but didnt pay anywhere near the price it reached at bonhams. It is really well designed is "travel ready" put on lid and all pieces stay in place. With only 12 supposedly made it was a great find.
edit:forgot to mention who made it Ove Arup (who founded the Arup group)
I hardly even play chess, but I do know the rules and how the pieces move, but this wrecks my intuitive sense of how the pieces move entirely, so I think it’d be a hard transition to regular pieces, which kind of kills any supposed benefit.
100 years ago Josef Hartwig designed a chess set for Bauhaus with the same principle: "the shape of each piece reflects how it moves: pawns and rooks move in straight lines and are represented as rectangular prisms, the bishops feature diagonal lines, the king has both straight and diagonal elements, and the knights are L-shaped"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hartwig#Chess_sets
Ok, but the attack direction is the easiest part of chess to learn. I learnt the rules of chess as a child and despite having played less than 20 games in my life I remember them entirely, including things like en passant.
I'd probably go with circle for the king, and maybe an L or a sideways H for the knight, even though they break the original design rule. Otherwise K/Q/N just look too similar.
Learning the movement is by far the easiest part of teaching beginners. It's fine as a design exercise, but its effect in making it easier to learn is close to null.
I have an overgrown dice pip renderer, so I made the rook "+", knight "L", bishop 4-gram, queen 8-gram, king octagon, and pawn a trapezoid (just to suggest movement direction).
https://vezquex.github.io/clock/chess/
Knight's movement is a "Γ" "Gamma" not an L. Some day a brilliant game may pop up, which has several letters and try to match em together, like an L, a Γ, an I and so on.
Interesting, it seems like we can "dissect" each piece into independent properties like possible directions and possible distances. Then one could generate chess set spaces randomly and have a lot of fun.
This is fantastic, I would love to try playing a game with these pieces. I think this could improve accessibility and also make the game less intimidating for newcomers.
Off topic, but does anyone know a browser extension that lets you block certain domains from the HN list? I've blocked twitter/x from my DNS, and don't want links to it cluttering the feed.
This selects for any `tr` which has an anchor to a url with twitter.com somewhere in it (with some layers in between) and the two `tr` which follow. Note that this is pretty naive and could have some false positives with links such as https://example.com/blog/a-post-about-twitter.com and such, you could be more careful with the attribute selector if you'd like
This will leave "holes" in the numbering of the list of items as the numbers are not calculated based on the structure of the document but are rather hardcoded. You could definitely fix this with some more funky css rules if needed.
I would think you could automatically load the first match's "hide" URL until no more matches appear in the page, but it might trip some kind of rate limiter.
Cool idea! Something about this makes me think about chaining moves, like function calls. Is there a version of chess where you get to keep moving if you take a piece?
I've been wanting the same exact thing! I think for beginners (and mediocre players like myself) it would help a lot to prevent blunders. Being able to visualize the squares attacked by the knight would be especially useful.
I've thought about having the squares show light shades of primary colors so you could see which side is attacking a square, and the composite colors would highlight contested ones, darker shades would mean more attackers. Like red/blue/purple or yellow/red/orange.
As a fellow mediocre player, my sense is that the best way to prevent blunders is to slow down and enumerate the possibilities. Sure, tools will help, just like having the computer suggest the three best lines will help, but it kind of defeats the purpose of trying to be good at the game. If you're frustrated by missing something that you feel you should have seen, slow down and see it next time.
isn't this idea about as trivial as it is useless? i can maybe see the appeal as a special edition for elderly homes or hospitals where people with brain injuries are treated but for a healthy person? learning a few rules? how about a simple cheat sheet squiggled on a piece of paper next to the board?
Even the pawns had a nice design which clearly indicated that movement of one square forward (normally), or attacking on the diagonal, were both allowed.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Yx4AAOSwTY9i7XeC/s-l960.jpg
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/AZUAAOSwuABi7XeE/s-l960.jpg