The Chess Variants Club Download Free
Unlike Wikipedia, which discourages original research, the Chess Variant Pages allows game inventors to publish the rules of their games here. This site aims to provide not only secondary sources on games but, where possible, primary sources too. Many of the people behind this site are game inventors who have published their games here, and you can too.
- Designing Your Game
- Posting Your Game
- Content
Designing Your Game
The Chess Variants Club Play and discover 21 popular chess variants, improve your chess skills with hundreds of chess puzzles, or simply play regular chess with your friends - all in one package. This diverse collection includes several chess games and puzzles. All in a minimalist, beautifully designed virtual chess club. The Chess Variants Club steam key free gift on SteamGateways.com. FREE Codes & Giveaways. FREE STEAM KEYS. Instant delivery 24/7. Instant download. FREE STEAM GAMES. Play and discover 21 popular chess variants, improve your chess skills with hundreds of chess puzzles, or simply play regular chess with your friends - all in one package. This diverse collection includes.
There are already hundreds, maybe even thousands, of Chess variants. So, before you get started inventing your own, you may want to take an overview of what has already been invented. This may help prevent you from reinventing a game someone else has already invented, and it may give you ideas for your own games. I am by no means suggesting that you review all earlier Chess variants. That's too Herculean a task, and I haven't done it myself. But start with an overview. Some good places to begin are with the following pages:
If you have an idea for a Chess variant, you may search this site to find out if anything like it has been done already. Some of my earliest games turned out to be similar to older games. Cavalier Chess was similar to Frank Maus's Cavalry Chess, and Fusion Chess was similar to Combination Chess and to some games by Frank Maus. While based on similar ideas, my games turned out to be very different from these. In one instance, I invented the same game as someone else, and this game was itself a modern version of one that was hundreds of years old. It is now a footnote on the Carrera's Chess page.
Ideas for games may come in multiple ways. You might be a reformer who wants to improve Chess, a long-time Chess player who wants a little more challenge from the game, or a creative, inventive type who wants to try out various ideas. When you have an idea for a game, look into games that are similar to it. If it's just a minor change to Chess, it might have been done already. But if it departs more from Chess, it might not have been done already. While lots of Chess variants have already been invented, there are many more possible Chess variants that no one has thought of yet.
When you have settled on an idea for your game, develop it into a game you would enjoy playing. I have written a guide on this subject called On Designing Good Chess Variants. This reviews the qualities of a good Chess variant and various principles that will help you create one with these qualities.
In designing your variant, it may help you to use physical equipment or a graphics tool for creating Chess variant diagrams. One idea is to put together a Chess Variant Construction Set. This consists of board tiles of various sizes, which you can arrange into different boards, and of various Chess variant pieces you can use with different games. An online tool that is available to you here is the Diagram Designer. This will draw various boards for you and let you place pieces from a variety of different sets on your board. Once you have designed your board, it will give you a link you can use to display your board as an image on a webpage.
Programming Your Game
A further step you might take in designing your game is to program and playtest it. There are two main advantages to this. If you can't find someone to play against in your local neighborhood, programming it can let you play against your computer or against someone online. This will give you more experience with the game, which will help you better evaluate what actually works and what doesn't. The other advantage is that programming a game makes you think about the rules much more thoroughly and systematically. In programming a game, you have to anticipate every possible kind of move and account for it. This means thinking about how the rules would handle situations that will rarely come up. In general, it is better for the inventor to anticipate how the rules should handle a situation than it is for players to one day encounter that situation and have no ruling on it. For example, the rules for Alice Chess, which was created decades before languages for easily programming Chess variants became available, allow for situations in which en passant capture seems to be impossible. This has led to different interpretations on how to handle en passant in Alice Chess, which are described on the page for that game. By programming your game, you can better anticipate problems like this before players of your game encounter them.
Programming your game might seem daunting, but there is no need for you to program it from scratch in something like C or Java. Since 1998, a program called Zillions-of-Games has been available on Windows. Although it hasn't been updated since 2002, it has worked perfectly well from Windows 95 to Windows 10, and it will also work with Wine under Linux. This program lets you design and program Chess variants that it will then play against you. The code for all the games it can play are in .zrf files, which are text files you can read and edit in a text editor. The language used is a high-level one similar to Lisp in its use of parentheses. What you basically do when you program a game with it is define the board, describe how the pieces move, place pieces on the board, and set the conditions for winning the game. Many times, you can program a new game just by modifying the code used for another game. And this is even easier than it used to be, because so many games have been programmed for Zillions-of-Games since its creation. This means there is a lot more source code available for you to learn from or adapt.
Another way for you to program and playtest your game is through Game Courier. This is for correspondence play with other people, not for playing against a computer engine, but it will let you program rule enforcement, the display of legal moves, and the evaluation of win/loss/draw conditions. Its programming language, called GAME Code, is more powerful than the Zillions-of-Games language, and it will let you program more games. But it is a bit lower level and will require more skill in programming. To help you out in programming a game for Game Courier, you will find documentation, tutorials, and lots of freely available source code for various games. Thanks to many games already having been programmed for it, programming your new game for it can sometimes just be a matter of slightly modifying the code used for another game.
Some other options for programming your game include ChessV and Jocly. Chessv is a program for playing Chess variants on Windows or Linux, and it will let you design some modifications of the games it already knows how to play. It is not as versatile as Zillions-of-Games, but it is free and might provide you with a stronger opponent. Jocly is a web-based Chess variant engine written in JavaScript. Its code for various games can be freely read and modified, but in my experience it is harder to work with than Zillions-of-Games and is not nearly as versatile. Its main advantages are that it can display 3D pieces, and it can provide computer opponents over the web.
Naming Your Game
Sometimes a name will inspire the creation of a game, and sometimes a name will come after the game is created. The main thing I would like you to do when naming your game is to make sure the name is not already used by another game. Name collisions can cause confusion, and they make the organization of games more difficult. Although this site does not include every Chess variant, at least check whether your game's name is already used by another game here. You can do this by searching this site for your game's name. Other than that, keep it brief, family-friendly, and appropriate for your particular game.
Posting Your Game
To post your game on this site, you should first become a member. Go to the Login page to register as a member. Once you have completed your registration, you will be able to post your game.
To do that, go to Post Your Own Game. This will display a form asking for some basic information about your game. Fill this out, then click on Step 2.
Content
You will then see a form with five text areas called Introduction, Setup, Pieces, Rules, and Notes. Once your game is posted, each section will normally be preceded by a header with the name of the section. So, you should not enter this yourself. If you put all of your text in the Introduction, it will not include any headers, and it will be up to you to include your own. This will let you use different sections when it is appropriate.
Introduction
The Introduction is where you describe the history, inspiration, or theme of your game. If it is your own game, you may recount how you came to invent the game, what other variants inspired it, or whatever else inspired it. If it is not your game, you may describe its origins, tell where it has been played, or mention what sources knowledge of the game comes from. For any game, yours or not, you may describe what the appeal of the game is or mention what other variants it is similar or related to.
Setup
The Setup is where you display a graphic image of the board with the pieces in their starting positions. You may upload a graphic image, which you may already have from programming the game, or you may use the Diagram Designer to produce a script-generated image that you can insert into your page without uploading any graphics. You will be able to upload images after you have created your initial page. On that page, there will be a link called 'upload files'. This will let you upload graphic images for your game. With the exception of selected pre-approved files, this will only let you upload GIF, PNG, and JPG files.
An alternative to uploading your own images is to display a script-generated image that you've made with the Diagram Designer. This will give you the HTML code for this image in a text area. Since it uses a different script to display the image than it does to let you edit it, you should not copy the diagram-designer.php URL from the address bar. Make sure you are using an URL with the drawdiagram.php script. If you have already programmed your game with Game Courier, you can quickly get an image of your game with Diagram Designer by selecting the Diagram Designer item from the Related menu for your game.
Although some pages include ASCII diagrams in addition to graphic diagrams, this is no longer important. Hardly anyone uses text-based browsers like Lynx. If you do want one, Game Courier can generate one for you. But graphic images are all-around better, and ASCII diagrams will probably help no one. So there is on need to include them.
You may also use this section for naming your pieces and their starting positions. For this purpose, it is best to label your ranks and files and to use algebraic notation. If you do not do this, it will be important to include an image of each piece when you describe them in the Pieces section.
Pieces
The Pieces section is for describing the powers of movement of each piece. Each description should be written out in English or whatever other natural language the page is in. You may supplement this description with Betza notation or with an interactive diagram in the setup section, but these should not be substitutes for written descriptions. The goal to keep in mind is that the page should fully explain how to play the game to someone who is reading a printout and does not understand Betza notation.
It is also important to make it clear where each piece goes on the board. This may be done by noting which spaces each piece starts on. But it is also very helpful to include an image with each piece description that matches an image of the piece used in the setup diagram. You may include piece graphics from this site through the use of shortcodes for displaying pieces.
Pieces should be described completely enough for someone to know how they move just from reading your page, but you may also link the piece names to Piececlopedia pages on the pieces. In describing how pieces move, it may be helpful to stick to some standard fairy chess terminology:
- leap
- n. An unblockable, direct move from one space to another.
- v. To make a leap
- leaper
- A piece that moves by leaping. Examples in Chess include the Knight and King.
- rider
- A piece that may make a series of leaps in the same direction as far as the board will allow, each of which must be to an empty space, except for the last, making it blockable. Examples in Chess are the Bishop, Rook, and Queen.
- hopper
- A piece that moves or captures only by hopping over an intervening piece. For example, the Cannon in Chinese Chess captures by hopping, and the Cannon in Korean Chess both moves and captures by hopping.
- divergent piece
- A piece that moves differently than it captures, such as the Pawn in Chess or the Cannon in Chinese Chess.
- royal piece
- The piece that must be checkmated to win the game. In most variants, this is the King, but it may be another piece in other games.
Rules
In the Rules section, you may assume famliarity with the rules of Chess, but you should describe every difference from those rules. Generally, you may begin with something like, 'This game follows the rules of Chess except as follows,' listing each difference from Chess separately. Alternately, where appropriate, you may say that a game is played exactly like Shogi or Xiangqi except as follows. But it is best to not assume familiarity with any other games. If unusual sitations may arise in your game that would not arise in Chess, be sure to cover rulings on them in your rules. Whether or not you program your game, try to describe your game in enough detail for someone to program it. This includes mentioning any special situation that could arise in the game, no matter how rare, and stating how it should be handled.
Notes
Finally, the Notes section is an optional section for adding any extra details about your game, such as game notation, strategy tips, suggestions for equipment to use, websites that cover it, etc.
Using CKEditor
The text area for each section makes use of CKEditor, which allows you two different modes for entering text. Although CKEditor's normal default is to start in WYSIWYG mode, which stands for What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get, the default here will be to start in Source mode, which will let you enter raw HTML. This stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and it is the main language that web pages are written in. So, fluency in it is highly recommended. Thanks to an extension added to CKEditor, this mode will use Codemirror, which will provide you with syntax highlighting of HTML and the autocompetion of tags. Each of the text areas will look like the one below. This is a live CKEditor example, not an image. So, you can try it out here.
This example currently appears as an ordinary textarea, because JavaScript is disabled or unavailable. Please install or enable JavaScript for CKEditor to work. Otherwise, be prepared to just enter your text as HTML.
If you're unfamiliar with HTML and prefer to write as you would in a word processor, you can switch to WYSYWIG mode by clicking the Source button. This button will toggle between Source mode, which lets you enter HTML, and What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get mode, which is commonly used by word processors. Whichever mode you choose, your text will be saved as HTML. It doesn't matter which mode you use, but when you're in WYSIWYG mode, be careful not to enter HTML. When you switch back to source mode, you will see that angle brackets have changed to HTML entities so that they display on the screen instead of functioning as HTML code.
If you initially write your description in a word processor, and that word processor happens to be Microsoft Word, you can use the 'Paste from Word' button in CKEditor to copy your text from your word processor. It is fifth from left in the top row.
Getting Your Game Published
Once you post the description of your game, it is up to an editor to approve it for publication to the site. Although it is not up to you when this happens, there are things you can do to get published sooner rather than later. Here is the most important guideline:
Minimize the work that the editors have to do to prepare your submission for publication.
Ideally, we want to read your submission only once, make only slight corrections for grammar or spelling, and publish it right away. Delays happen when it is not that easy for us. Here are some more specific guidlines on how to reduce the work we have to do before publishing your submission.
Be brief
The more there is to read, the longer it will take to process it.
Be clear
If we have to ask you questions about what you mean, that's going to take more time. Make sure to avoid any ambiguities. Using standard terminology with help with this. Linking to piece articles in the Piececlopedia will also make it clearer what pieces you are using.
Be comprehensive
Make sure that your description covers everything that could possibly happen in your game. One good way of doing this is to think about how you would program the game. If you are not comprehensive, we may have questions about how your game would handle various situations, and that will delay getting your game published.
Also bear in mind that the page you create here should fully describe a game without needing to refer the reader to other pages. The main exception to this is that you may say that a game is like Chess except for the various differences you describe from Chess.
Use only local graphics
Graphics on other websites are out of our control and could go down without notice. To make sure that your page always has the graphics you want, upload them to our site with the File Manager, or use the Diagram Designer and shortcodes to make use of graphic resources already available on our site. Besides the graphics sources available through the site, you may use screenshots from programs, such as Zillions of Games, or you may use the Musketeer Chess Board Painter Tool. Just make sure to upload your images here and to reduce them in size if you can. Since the File Manager enables you to reduce the filesize of images, you may reduce their size after uploading them.
Check your page regularly in case editors have left questions or requests for you.
If your description is not clear or comprehensive enough, we will have questions for you. If you delay in answering our questions, that will delay the publication of your game. We may also request that you make changes to your page. Making all requested changes promptly will help speed up how quickly your game is ready for publication.
To see any comments made on your page during the review process, keep track of its URL, and check in on it periodically. Or sign in, and then select the 'Your Unreviewed Submissions' item in the menu headed by your name. This will send you to a page listing your unreviewed submissions.
Remind us to review and publish your page.
When you think your game is ready for publication, and nothing seems to be happening on our end, leave a comment on your page to remind us to look at it again. Bear in mind that we might still have more questions for you. So, keep checking in, as mentioned above, until your game does get published.
Editing your Page
During the review process or possibly later, you may want to make changes to your page. To do this, go to your game's page, scroll just below the content of your page, and click on the option that says 'edit the contents.' In the screenshot below, the mouse pointer did not show up, but the link it was hovering over got highlighted.
Note that this same section includes a link for 'upload files.' You may use this to upload graphic images. This option becomes available after you have initially created your page.
Creating Graphics
It is generally expected that you will include diagrams and piece images on your page. This site provides some resources you may use to generate diagrams. One is the Diagram Designer, which is based on the code Game Courier uses to generate board images. This lets you fill out a form with various values that are given to another script as query string parameters. This other script displays a graphic image, and it can be used in an HTML IMG tag just like a graphic image.
H. G. Muller has written scripts in JavaScript for creating Interactive Diagrams. Besides showing an image of the board, they show legal moves, allow pieces to be moved, and show individual movement diagrams for each piece.
The Musketeer Chess website provides a Board Painter Tool. This can be very useful for movement diagrams, because it provides markers for designating different kinds of moves. Although you may not link directly to images on other websites, you may download the images it produces and upload them here, and, if need be, reduce their file size.
Another option is to take a screeshot from a computer program and upload it here. One program that is good for just about any Chess variant is Zillions of Games.
Using Piece Image Shortcodes
Shortcodes are primarily meant for use along with the Diagram Designer, because they use the same piece images.
The first shortcode to use is [set]. It takes one parameter, which is the name of the set. If you used the Diagram Designer to produce your diagram, the URL it gives you will be to a PHP script with a query string describing the board. One of the parameters should be of the form set=something. Use that as your set name. For example, if it was set=alfaerie, use the short code [set alfaerie]. If set does not appear in your diagram's query string, it is using the default value of abstract1. For that, use the code [set abstract1].
Next, for each piece, use the [pc] shortcode. Within the square brackets, follow the pc by a space and then by the same piece label used in the FEN code. You should already be familiar with which letter matches each piece if you used the Diagram Designer. If not, look in your diagram's query string for the value of code. To display the name with the piece, follow the label by another space, and enter the name before the closing bracket. To include a piece description, write it between the opening [pc] tag and a closing [/pc] tag.
Uploading Files
On the page for your game, you will find a menu item in the Edit menu called Upload or Manage Files. This will allow you to use the File Manager to upload files for your page. This is limited to common graphic image formats and to some types of text content. You are limited to 2MB per game of uploaded files. In case your files are larger than this, the File Manager enables you to reduce the file size of graphic images. After you upload your images, the File Manager will display them all, and it will tell you what URL to use in your IMG tag.
WWW page created: April 5, 2016.Introduction
Fairy-Max is an AI, also called 'engine', for playing Chess variants. It is free open-source software, authored by H.G. Muller. It was created for the purpose of empirically evaluating fairy pieces, by allowing those to participate amongst orthodox Chess pieces in Chess games aimed at checkmating an opponent royal piece. It searches ahead like the FIDE-Chess engine from which it was derived (the World's once smallest Chess program, micro-Max) by generating moves and trying them out on the internal board. To know how each piece type moves, micro-Max uses tables with step vectors, and it knows which pieces are leapers and which are sliders. In Fairy-Max, the contents of these tables is not fixed, but is loaded from a configuration file 'fmax.ini' at the start of each game. This allows the user to change the way pieces move (or add pieces of his own design) without changing the program, by altering the contents of the fmax.ini file. Fmax.ini is a normal text file and thus can be modified with any text editor (e.g. Notepad). |
Fairy-Max is only an AI. It does not provide any graphics to display the position of the game it is playing, but only relays the moves as text. It is primarily designed to be run as an engine inside the WinBoard GUI, and it communicates with this GUI in WinBoard protocol. Although there are several other GUIs that support WinBoard protocol, they will in general not offer as much variant support as WinBoard. Most GUIs only support normal Chess. ChessGUI by Matthias Gemuh also supports 10x8 Capablanca variants. Note that there are also many other WinBoard-compatible engines for playing variants that can be played under WinBoard. Some even play variants that Fairy-Max could never implement (e.g. Xiangqi or Crazyhouse).
Setup
Fairy-Max nowadays is included in the standard WinBoard install, which can be downloaded from here as a binary installer, for a ready-to-run out-of-the-box solution. There also is a package with just the engine containing the engine executable, and the fmax.ini (which contains its own format description). To install that, just extract this folder to a suitable place on your hard disk. The default memory usage of Fairy-Max is 96MB, almost all used for its hash table. If this does not comfortably fit in memory together with the engine process of the opponent (if there is a computer opponent), Fairy-Max will not run properly, and you would have to reduce the hash size. This can be done from WinBoard's Common Engine Options dialog. WinBoard's Engine Settings dialog can be used to set to affect Fairy-Max' behavior. It is for instance possible to select the armies you want to use when playing variant 'fairy', which is currently set to play Chess with Different Armies. | Table 1: Variants pre-defined in the supplied fmax.ini
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The piece descriptions in the fmax.ini file are grouped into variants, so that setting the engine to a certain variant (from the User Interface), will load the group of piece descriptions for that variant. The Fairy-Max download comes with an fmax.ini that predefines several variants (FIDE Chess, Capablanca Chess, Shatranj, Courier, Knightmate, Cylinder Chess, Makruk, Superchess, Seirawan Chess, Falcon Chess, Great Shatranj, Berolina Chess, Bifurcator Chess, Team-Mate Chess), which can serve as an example for those that want to implement their own variants. In addition, the fmax.ini file contains definitions of the most common fairy pieces not participating in the predefined variants, so that the user can draw on them when composing his own variants. Although Fairy-Max supports merely 15 different piece types, this is only a limitation to the number of different piece types that can participate simultaneously in a single game. In a game of another variant, all 15 pieces could move completely differently.
The board size for each variant is also defined in the fmax.ini file, and is currently limited to 12x8. (Expansion of the number of ranks is on the to-do list.) The default opening position is also defined in there, but can be overruled by loading a position through the User Interface.
Pieces
Table 2: attributes that can be combined to define a move type
| Apart from Pawns, orthodox Chess pieces only come in two different types: leapers and sliders. Leapers can only do one step of a given type, while sliders can repeat their elementary step indefinitely, as long as they do not encounter an obstruction (piece or board edge). If the obstruction is an enemy piece, it can be captured, (both by leapers and sliders), but the move cannot continue after that even for a slider. As not all fairy pieces fall in the slider or leaper category, Fairy-Max implements two additional move types: hoppers and two-stage movers. Hoppers are sliders that can jump over the first obstruction in their path, and continue from there, with possibly a different type of move. The best known examples are the Cannon (Pao) from Chinese Chess, and the Grasshopper. The Pao changes its move type from 'non-capture-only' to 'capture-only' on hopping. The Grasshopper changes it from 'none' to 'both' (capture and non-capture), and in addition from slider to leaper. (It is only allowed to do one step after the hop, in contrast to the Pao, which remains a slider after hopping.) |
Two-stage movers do not need to hop over anything to change their move type, but do so spontaneously after a certain number of steps. This can be a change in step direction, to provide bent trajectories, but also in capture rights. E.g. a Xiangqi Elephant makes 2 diagonal steps in the same direction, on the first step it is not allowed to do anything (capture or non-capture) but continue, (if the square is empty, of course), on the second step it can both capture and non-capture (but is not allowed to continue any further, even if the square was empty). The Xiangqi Horse is similar, but also changes direction between the first and second step. By starting as slider, and in the second stage changing to leaper after a given number of slider steps, one can implement limited-range sliders.
The Griffon is an example of a slider that changes direction after the first step (but keeps the rights to capture, non-capture and slide on). For simplicity, Fairy-Max treats every slider that is not a hopper as a two-stage mover. In cases where this is not desired (e.g. for the Rook), it simply has the moves (direction and rights) in both stages identical. In stead of changing direction of the step, one can also change the length. E.g. starting as a D and halving the step size after one step (but continuing to slide) would define a Rook that skips the first square.
An otherwise useless rights combination for the first stage is used to indicate that the move is only allowed for virgin pieces. The second stage then specifies the real move. Castlings are recognized as a special case of such a virgin initial move.
To provide flexibility in implementation of fairy pieces, the discription of the move type has to be given for each direction separately, rather than for the piece as a whole. This to allow mixed sliders/leapers, such as the Archbishop, which combines the Knight (leaper) and Bishop (slider) moves. For implementation of hoppers and two-stage movers, the move description (direction and type) has to be given twice (primary and secondary move descriptor).
Fairy-Max makes no assumptions to the symmetry of the piece, meaning that all directions in which the piece moves have to be specified explicitly. E.g. for a Rook we have to list 4 moves, for a Knight 8. However annoying this sometimes might be, this is necessary for allowing implementation of asymmetric pieces such as the Crab or the Shogi Generals. Unfortunately, Fairy-Max is not smart enough yet to realize that the different sides play in opposite direction. Thus asymmetric pieces (such as Pawns) have to be implemented as different piece types for white and black. (E.g. what is a Crab for white, will be a Barc for black, and vice versa.) The following pieces have predefined descriptions in fmax.ini, ready for copying to your own variants.
Table 3: Pieces that are pre-defined in the fmax.ini that comes with the download
| SIMPLE LEAPERS | COMPOUND LEAPERS | LEAPER-SLIDER COMPOUND | SLIDERS | LAME LEAPERS | CYLINDER PIECES |
| Ferz | King / Commoner | Archbishop | Bishop | Elephant (Xiangqi) | Cylinder Bishop |
| Wazir | Bison | Chancellor | Rook | Horse (Xiangqi) | Cylinder Rook |
| Knight | Wildebeest | Caliph | Nightrider | DIVERGENT | Cylinder Knight |
| Dabbaba | Carpenter | Canvasser | Queen | FIDE Pawn | Cylinder Queen |
| Elephant (Alfil) | Kangaroo | Amazon | LIMITED RANGE | Shatranj Pawn | Cylinder Pawn |
| Camel | High Priestess | HOPPERS | R2-R5 | Berolina Pawn | BENT SLIDERS |
| Zebra | Minister | Grasshopper | Quing | Griffon | |
| Crab / Barc | Cannon (Xiangqi) | Keen | Aanca |
Rules
This section gives an indication of how the Chess variants are defined in the fmax.ini file. After a line 'Game:
For each piece, we have to give the letter by which it is represented when feeding a position to the engine, and the value the engine should attach to it in play. (So beware, Fairy-Max is not smart enough to figure this out by itself. If you tell it an immensely powerful piece like a Queen is only worth half a Pawn, it will happily trade it for one!) Pieces that are given a negative value are assumed royal. If the value is below -4, extinction royalty is assumed, and the game is won by capturing all royals (where the spare ones are assumed to have a value opposite of what was specified), otherwise the capture of the first royal decides the game.
Then follows on the same line a list of move descriptors, one for each direction the piece moves in. A move description consists of an elementary board step, and a number that specifies the move attributes, i.e. what the piece is allowed to do in this direction (if it can capture and/or non-capture, if it is leaper or slider, if it can hop over an obstacle or not, if it respects the board edges or wraps around.) The exact way the step vectors and attributes are encoded is specified in comment lines contained in the fmax.ini, as it might still be subject to change in future versions.
The first two pieces specified are by definition the white and black Pawns. That means that Fairy-Max will let them promote if they reach the last rank. Fairy-Max always promotes to 'Queen', i.e. the 7th piece specified, however that moves. If the black army does not contain a piece #7 in the initial setup, but a piece #9 instead, black will promote to that 9th piece. If castling moves are specified on a King, any original corner piece can be used to castle with.
Notes
There are many things that Fairy-Max cannot do; it was never meant to be a general game-playing system like Zillions of Games. Amongst the impossibilities are piece drops, (as in Crazyhouse or Shogi), and pieces for which the moves are dependent on their location on the board (as in Xiangqi). For some pieces the move is simply too complicated to fit within the Fairy-Max move-type classification system (e.g. Rose, Crooked Bishop).
Playing Tips
Positional evaluation in Fairy-Max is fairly primitive: a piece either is drawn towards the center, or not. If you want a piece to be drawn to the center, you should indicate it by a lower-case letter. Pawns do get a large positional bonus when they reach 6th or 7th rank, of 64 and 128 units ('centiPawn' in FIDE Chess), respectively. This assumes that the piece to which the Pawns will promote is of decisive value, so the opponent will have to sacrifice a piece to stop the promotion. For Shatranj and Courier Chess, where Pawns promote to the worthless Ferz, this would lead to nonsensible play. To cure that, Fairy-Max divides these bonuses by 8 if the promotion piece is worth less than 200 centiPawn. The strategy of Fairy-Max is mostly tailored to normal Chess, with normal Pawns that make decisive promotions, so it might never become a really good Shatranj or Courier player.
The first three moves of each game that Fairy-Max plays are chosen randomly from those that do not immediately give away material. This causes Fairy-Max to vary its play despite the absense of an opening book. The shadow side of this is that the initial moves might be no good positionally at all.
Equipment
Fairy-Max runs on a PC under any Windows operating system. The memory demand is determined by the size of its hash table, which by default is 96M. It would still run with a smaller hash table, but the larger the hash table, the better its play. Running with a hash table smaller than 6MB is not recommended.
Contact
Questions about Fairy-Max can be posted as comments to this page, which are checked regularly by H.G. Muller. Written by H.G. Muller. WWW page created: July 22, 2008.This 'user submitted' page is a collaboration between the posting user and the Chess Variant Pages. Registered contributors to the Chess Variant Pages have the ability to post their own works, subject to review and editing by the Chess Variant Pages Editorial Staff.
By H. G. Muller.