En passant

[Pargat Perrer]

A great idea for a follow-up to The Queens Gambit!!!!

[Erik Malmsten]

En passant has to be the stupidest move in chess.

Period.

The stupidest idea is that a pawn can easily kill a queen. In a real battle there are 10 if not 100 times more injuries than deaths.

So a pawn attack should only weaken a queen or piece. Say the Queen returned to the back rank and can henceforth only move 5 squares in any direction. Taken by a pawn again can only move 4 squares. If the Queen was initially taken by a knight than the Queen can only move 3 squares, but taken again she will die.

[Neil Frarey]

The stupidest idea is that a pawn can easily kill a queen. In a real battle there are 10 if not 100 times more injuries than deaths.

So a pawn attack should only weaken a queen or piece. Say the Queen returned to the back rank and can henceforth only move 5 squares in any direction. Taken by a pawn again can only move 4 squares. If the Queen was initially taken by a knight than the Queen can only move 3 squares, but taken again she will die.

Interesting idea for VR chess, I can already see the data HUD environment, ha!

[Erik Malmsten]

And when a pawn takes a knight the injuried knight returns to the back rank and can no longer jump over pieces. A pawn takes a Rook or bishop and they can only move 5 squares. A knight or bishop takes a rook and it can only move 3 squares. An injured piece will die upon second capture.

[Pargat Perrer]

The stupidest idea is that a pawn can easily kill a queen. In a real battle there are 10 if not 100 times more injuries than deaths.

So a pawn attack should only weaken a queen or piece. Say the Queen returned to the back rank and can henceforth only move 5 squares in any direction. Taken by a pawn again can only move 4 squares. If the Queen was initially taken by a knight than the Queen can only move 3 squares, but taken again she will die.

Interesting idea for VR chess, I can already see the data HUD environment, ha!

Fascinating. I just recently programmed a variant something like what Erik describes, in that the sliding pieces (Queen, Rook, Bishop) can have their ranges set by the user. From 1 square range up to 7 squares range. The Knights, Pawns and Kings are unchanged from normal chess.

And I do call this VR Chess where the VR = Variable Range.

The ranges can only increase during the game. The range increases by 1 whenever the sliding piece (1) captures anything greater than Pawn, or (2) reaches the opponent's back rank.

Pawn captures are all just like in normal chess.

I don't think it's stupid that Pawns can kill opposing pieces, even Queen. But on the other hand, maybe all attacks, whether by Pawn or any other piece, should give a random result: possible kill the opposing piece, or send it back to its starting square and decrement its range by some set amount (the range can only go down to 1, never 0 or negative). If a piece is attacked on its starting square, it is always killed.

Knights would always be killed by any attack because anything else gets just too complicated.

[Erik Malmsten]

Fascinating. I just recently programmed a variant something like what Erik describes, in that the sliding pieces (Queen, Rook, Bishop) can have their ranges set by the user. From 1 square range up to 7 squares range. The Knights, Pawns and Kings are unchanged from normal chess.

And I do call this VR Chess where the VR = Variable Range.

The ranges can only increase during the game. The range increases by 1 whenever the sliding piece (1) captures anything greater than Pawn, or (2) reaches the opponent's back rank.

Pawn captures are all just like in normal chess.

I don't think it's stupid that Pawns can kill opposing pieces, even Queen. But on the other hand, maybe all attacks, whether by Pawn or any other piece, should give a random result: possible kill the opposing piece, or send it back to its starting square and decrement its range by some set amount (the range can only go down to 1, never 0 or negative). If a piece is attacked on its starting square, it is always killed.

Knights would always be killed by any attack because anything else gets just too complicated.

Injured piece range can increase over time as they heal (+ 1 square every 10 moves?). They are most vulnerable just after they have been captured fir the first time.

In your system of increasing value by getting a queen, rook or bishop to the back rank would be a rare accomplishment until the endgame. Moves Re7-e8-e7-e8-e7-e8 would quickly restore full power.

If captured by a Queen or King the piece is dead and leaves the board. A twist could be that a dead pawn (or piece) could be left on the battlefield, blocking pieces and requiring a move (like pass) to remove from the board.

If knights are wounded their moves can be limited by not being able to jump over pieces.

Injured pieces can be denoted by pulling a white hat over their head. White fabric with a red cross, and an elastic to hold it onto the neck of the piece.

[Pargat Perrer]

Injured piece range can increase over time as they heal (+ 1 square every 10 moves?). They are most vulnerable just after they have been captured fir the first time.

In your system of increasing value by getting a queen, rook or bishop to the back rank would be a rare accomplishment until the endgame. Moves Re7-e8-e7-e8-e7-e8 would quickly restore full power.

If captured by a Queen or King the piece is dead and leaves the board. A twist could be that a dead pawn (or piece) could be left on the battlefield, blocking pieces and requiring a move (like pass) to remove from the board.

If knights are wounded their moves can be limited by not being able to jump over pieces.

Injured pieces can be denoted by pulling a white hat over their head. White fabric with a red cross, and an elastic to hold it onto the neck of the piece.

Yes, it is rare to get a sliding piece to the 8th rank until the endgame, but there's 2 things about that:
(1) tactics can arise when capturing or just moving a sliding piece to the 8th rank and increasing its range -- for example, if the opponent captures the piece, it may enable a fork or an xray attack.
(2) in the middlegame, the other criteria of capturing any piece greater than Pawn is predominant and introduces new motifs as well. For example, taking a Knight with a Bishop may enable your Bishop to be captured by a Queen, Rook or Bishop and increasing that piece's range by 1.

I have found in test games that these 2 criteria for increasing range are very adequate and add whole new dimensions to the game play.

About Knights being limited by not being able to jump over pieces:

You would need to specify how Knights exactly move, which I don't know if the official rules of chess actually specify this. I mean, it is specified WHERE the Knight can move, but not THE PATH the Knight takes to make this move. Is it a 3-square move or a 2-square move? A 2-square move means one of the moves is moving diagonally.

So lets say you have a White Knight on d4. There is a Black Bishop on c6. You want to capture the c6 Bishop. There is a Pawn on d5 and a Pawn on c4. Is this sufficient to block the Knight from going to c6? What if the Knight moves d4-c5 (diagonal move) then c5-c6? The c5 square is open, therefore the move can be made.

You would have to put it into the rules the exact path Knights take in each of their possible moves. If you specify that no diagonal moves are involved, then a wounded Knight on a central square can be completely blockaded by pieces occupying the squares to its north, south, east and west. But if diagonal moves are part of the path, it would take pieces on all 8 surrounding squares to completely blockade the wounded Knight.

I prefer to leave Knights totally out of these rules and just allow them to always make their moves, they don't have a range or any limitation, and if attacked they are removed from the board as in chess. I also prefer that any capture removes the piece from the board, it just keeps things simpler (KISS principle).

Whereas having the variable moving ranges for sliding pieces only, while not adhering to the KISS principle, adds enough new strategical and tactical motifs that are relatively easy to keep track of. The only thing is that for actual OTB play, one needs to identify the ranges of each piece visually on the piece itself -- I was thinking of something like a colored disk that the piece sits on top of, and the color identifies the range. But still that is clumsy and I think this game is best for computer play only, where the actual range number 1 to 7 can be overlaid on top of the piece image, and it's all done by the program. No fiddling about with anything.

One thing this could be useful for is odds games. Instead of removing a Pawn or a Rook, simply modify the ranges of some sliding pieces in the opening position.

But where it would really be a boon would be problem composition, in which the sliding pieces have specific ranges to make it work. There would be infinite possibilities, maybe not literally but close enough.

And there is a third possibility: combining other games with VR Chess. For example, set up the opening position where every sliding piece for both players has a range of 1. Then play table tennis, where you serve 6 serves and how ever many of your serves you win, your sliding Rook on a1 gets that many squares added to its range. So if you win all 6 serves, your a1 Rook has its full range of 7 squares. Then your opponent serves 6 serves at table tennis, and his or her a8 Rook gets its range updated in the same way. Continue alternating serves to determine ranges of all the sliding pieces. If you are by far the better table tennis player, then you will win the VR Chess easily, so the table tennis helps decide the VR Chess result but the chess game itself still decides the overall result. Instead of table tennis, play darts to determine starting ranges. Or think up some other combination.