BugHouse / CrazyHouse under Winboard

[hgm]

Has anyone been using Winboard to play CrazyHouse / Bughouse games? (e.g. on a Chess server?)

I would like to know how this works, and what kind of support Winboard offers for the piece drops, because I want to know if this can be easily adapted to make Winboard support Shogi.

[TonyJH]

I think Winboard can work this way, but people who play crazyhouse and bughouse online are much more likely to use another interface such as Thief or Babaschess, mainly because Winboard doesn't have a graphical display of the pieces held. To drop a piece using Winboard, I think you have to right-click on the square and then select the piece type to be dropped.
It would be nice if the crazyhouse support of Winboard was improved.

I do use Winboard to run my engine on chess servers for crazyhouse and bughouse games. I also use Winboard to run local engine vs engine crazyhouse games.

[hgm]

OK, thanks. From looking at the sources I already started to suspect that the WinBoard support for Crazyhouse was rather wanting.

I think I have a reasonably simple kludge to fix it, though: Make the board 12 x 8 in stead of 8x8, using only the central 8 files for playing board, and the edge files to park the pieces that are in the holdings (with a guard file in between). The GUI would then consider the holdings as a part of the board, and would allow dragging and dropping pieces from holding squares to playing-board squares.

One other question:

I suppose it is important in Crazyhouse to be able to see the distinction between an oriiginal Queen and a Queen that is merely a promoted Pawn, (and likewise for other pieces), as on capture the promoted pieces revert back to Pawn. Is there any preference on how to do that?

I was thinking about using piece color for this: make promoted white pieces light gray, and promoted black pieces dark grey. That seems better than introducing other pictograms (e.g. slightly smaller versions), and also easier to implement.

For Shogi the problem would be bigger, as there are 5 different pieces that all promote to Gold General. So colors (or sizes) would not provide sufficient possibilities for recognition there...

[Vempele]

I suppose it is important in Crazyhouse to be able to see the distinction between an oriiginal Queen and a Queen that is merely a promoted Pawn, (and likewise for other pieces), as on capture the promoted pieces revert back to Pawn. Is there any preference on how to do that?

It isn't that important, really. I've never had problems remembering which queens are promoted - most of the time, promoted queens "sacrifice" themselves quickly anyway, since it's useful for the attack that's most likely going on.

[hgm]

I remember that, when I played this game as a student in Human-Human play (Bughouse, really), we actually kept representing the promoted pieces by Pawns (due to obvious hardware limitations).

[Ovyron]

I suppose it is important in Crazyhouse to be able to see the distinction between an oriiginal Queen and a Queen that is merely a promoted Pawn, (and likewise for other pieces), as on capture the promoted pieces revert back to Pawn. Is there any preference on how to do that?

I was thinking about using piece color for this: make promoted white pieces light gray, and promoted black pieces dark grey. That seems better than introducing other pictograms (e.g. slightly smaller versions), and also easier to implement.

As a crazyhouse lover I vote for the smaller pieces solution (A promoted pawn to queen would show as a smaller queen). Is it hard to implement different sizes for the pieces?

Also, I don't like the idea of different colored pieces, I for sure would be confused when there is a gray piece around, and I would probably wonder at one time if it belongs to me or to the opponent.

[hgm]

OK, so the color solution is out. Wouldn't work for Shogi anyway.

Winboard supports 18 different display sizes, and has FIDE-piece bitmaps for all of them. So I guess it would be easy enough to introduce some extra pieces that are displayed one or two sizes smaller. The only drawback is that you couldn't use the smalles display sizes anymore for Crazyhouse, which seems insignificant. I would just have to figure out how much to shift the smaller pieces to align them to the larger squares in an estethically pleasing way.


In Shogi the promotion problem is a bit different, as the piece representations should contain some information about what the original piece was. This information should not dominate over the main characteristics of the symbol, though, which should in the first place reveal how the piece currently moves.

So promoted Pawn, Lance, Knight and Silver General should all be slightly modified versions of the Gold General. (Of course the traditional Shogi pieces do not respect such design rules at all; they are mere chips that have unintllegible characters written on them. But as this is exactly one of the reasons that I wouldn't play Shogi, I am not going to copy that horror.)

The following Westernized representation comes to mind, using the symbols for the closest equivalents to the Shogi pieces that exist in Western fairy Chess, and the bitmaps I already implemented for those:

Soldier becomes a Pawn (but moves and captures straight ahead only)
Honerable Horse becomes a Knight (but has only the two forward-most moves of it)
Angle Walker becomes a Bishop (exact equivalent, but can promote)
Flying Chariot becomes a Rook (exact equivalent, but can promote)
Silver General becomes a Ferz/General (but has an extra move straight ahead)
Gold General becomes Wazir/GrandVizer (but has two extra forward diagonal moves)
Lance becomes a Cannon (for lack of anything better, as a Lance is a Rook that only moves forward)
Dragon Horse (promoted B) becomes Archbishop (but is B+K in stead of B+N)
Dragon King (promoted R) becomes Chancellor (but is R+K in stead of R+N)
King remains King (exact equivalent)

Pawn, Lance, Knight and Silver all promote to Gold, and must thus have representations similar (but no identical) to that of the Wazir. Now in my piece set the Wazir is represented by a turban, with a Jewel ornament on it. I could simply vary the shape of that ornament to indicate the ancestry:

Gold General: a solid jewel
Siver General: a 5-pointed star
Knight: a crescent moon (horse shoe?)
Lance: an open circle (cannon ball?)
Pawn: no ornament

[Tord Romstad]

In Shogi the promotion problem is a bit different, as the piece representations should contain some information about what the original piece was. This information should not dominate over the main characteristics of the symbol, though, which should in the first place reveal how the piece currently moves.

So promoted Pawn, Lance, Knight and Silver General should all be slightly modified versions of the Gold General. (Of course the traditional Shogi pieces do not respect such design rules at all; they are mere chips that have unintllegible characters written on them. But as this is exactly one of the reasons that I wouldn't play Shogi, I am not going to copy that horror.)

Actually, the character on promoted pawns, lances, knights and silver generals is the character for "gold", for all four pieces. The character is just written in different "fonts" depending on the unpromoted piece type. The character on the promoted silver is the one which most closely resembles a printed "gold" character, while the other pieces get increasingly cursive versions of the character as the values of the corresponding non-promoted pieces decrease.

I never had any problems recognizing the various shogi pieces, and my impression is that most other beginners also learn all of them very quickly. Nevertheless, it is possible that your suggestion for western-style shogi pieces can make the game less scary to some people, so I support your work.

Tord

[hgm]

I guess in play the piece is actually worth more if the original piece was worth less.

Of course the option /renderPiecesWithFont would allow the user to tailor the piece representation at will, using the real thing with pentagonal pieces and Japanese characters. I could not find any non-commercial Shogi fonts on the web, though.

To make the Winboard display look even more like the 'real thing' you could define dark and light squares as the same color. (Although I consider having no checkered board in a game with a Bishop and other design flaw...)

[TonyJH]

I think I have a reasonably simple kludge to fix it, though: Make the board 12 x 8 in stead of 8x8, using only the central 8 files for playing board, and the edge files to park the pieces that are in the holdings (with a guard file in between). The GUI would then consider the holdings as a part of the board, and would allow dragging and dropping pieces from holding squares to playing-board squares.

I like this idea. It would be a nice improvement for crazyhouse. A couple of thoughts:

Could the 'guard' files be colored differently than the rest of the board?

If black held two pawns, would you put a little "2" next to the black pawn in the holdings area? Otherwise you could display two black pawns in the holdings area, but you might run out of space this way.