best server for computers to play variants currently?

[Angrim]

lichess has a decent amount of variant games, I see 4 atomic games at the moment, 9 crazyhouse, and 3 suicide(antichess) games... but 0 bot games. They just don't seem to want to encourage anything other than stockfish :/ So repeating my question in hopes that the answer somehow changes, is there anywhere that computers can play variants and expect to get a game currently?

One way to check how your program plays atomic is to download stockfish variant that can play atomic, then do a match against your engine. You can use winboard gui for this, given of course if your engine supports cecp (xboard/winboard) protocol.

Yea, it's real easy to get a game against stockfish. lichess has stockfish built in, and it's available for download. But that gets boring pretty quick, and there is no human involved to chat with during the games. That was actually one of my favourite parts back when FICS was variant central, getting to chat with all the other variant authors while we watched our engines battle. And having occasional humans challenge it was fun also.

[George Tsavdaris]

Yea, it's real easy to get a game against stockfish. lichess has stockfish built in, and it's available for download. But that gets boring pretty quick, and there is no human involved to chat with during the games. That was actually one of my favourite parts back when FICS was variant central, getting to chat with all the other variant authors while we watched our engines battle. And having occasional humans challenge it was fun also.

Yeah good days.
But if you decide to match your program against Stockfish, do not try Lichess Stockfish as it's too weak and try the full force normal downloaded one.
I'm too curious how your program does against Stockfish in Atomic Chess. Since your program was the best by far in the old days, but now Stockfish is REAL monster in Atomic Chess so i do wonder if your program can resist a bit....

[MikeB]

lichess has a decent amount of variant games, I see 4 atomic games at the moment, 9 crazyhouse, and 3 suicide(antichess) games... but 0 bot games. They just don't seem to want to encourage anything other than stockfish :/ So repeating my question in hopes that the answer somehow changes, is there anywhere that computers can play variants and expect to get a game currently?

I can re-introduce a play by Elo function in Daniel Dugovic's SF variant - not that it would be a real Elo, but at directionally and the strength improvement as the Elo is increased would be a resemblance of how it would work on a server.

I just added branch 'variant_uci_elo' - obviously it is just a means to play a weakened variant and not in any way tied to published Elo's for variant chess. No exe's provided, but feel free to compile your own. You can also play adaptive style and combine with UCI_Elo to play a really weak variant version.

Link: https://github.com/MichaelB7/Stockfish/ ... nt_uci_elo
Source https://github.com/MichaelB7/Stockfish/ ... ci_elo.zip

The normal makefile commands for Stockfish will build it.

Here I played crazy house at the lowest Elo setting of 1000 with adaptive play turned on.

It's pretty weak:

[Event "Mac Pro x5690 3.46 Ghz "]
[Site "Mac-Pro.local"]
[Date "2019.12.14"]
[Round "-"]
[White "michaelbyrne"]
[Black "Stockfish 2019-12-14 64 POPCNT Multi-Variant (UCI2WB)"]
[Result "1-0"]
[TimeControl "120+2"]
[Variant "crazyhouse"]
[Annotator "18... -38.01"]

1. e4 e6 2. d4 Nc6 3. Nf3 Nf6 4. e5 b6 {-0.13/1 +110} 5. Bb5 Ne4 6. O-O Bb7
{-2.14/1 +106} 7. Nc3 Nxc3 {-2.89/1 +103} 8. bxc3 a6 {-2.35/1 +101} 9. Bxc6
a5 {-2.14/1 +99} 10. Bxb7 Rb8 {-14.97/1 +96} 11. Be4 b5 {-13.91/1 +94} 12.
Ng5 c6 {-14.81/1 +91} 13. Nxf7 a4 {-23.34/1 +89} 14. B@h5 Qa5
{-29.43/1 +86} 15. Nd6+ Kd8 {-33.14/2 +84} 16. Bg5+ N@e7 {-31.41/1 +81} 17.
P@f6 c5 {-35.84/1 +79} 18. N@f7+ Kc7 {-38.01/3 +76} 19. Ne8+ Kb6
{-26.22/1 +73} 20. Rb1 Nd5 {-30.02/1 +71} 21. N@c4+ Kc6 {-26.24/1 +68} 22.
Nxh8 a3 {-36.66/1 +65} 23. Nxa5+ Kb6 {-45.48/2 +63} 24. Nc4+ Ka6
{-55.01/1 +60} 25. Bxd5 b4 {-56.96/1 +57} 26. R@a5#
{Black resigns} 1-0

[RichV]

Does anyone know of a chess engine that can be used for a chess variant that uses a circular board? My game, Castle Siege Chess, uses a board that merges a 6x6 square board into the center of a circular board.

I have previously used Zillions of Games script to program it with high success, but Zillions costs $25 for anyone to be able to play my game and I can't manage to get it to work online. Jocly might work, but I am not good enough to figure out how to quickly program it using JavaScript and I don't think the Jocly site is back up yet after it was hacked. If anyone is interested in taking on my game as a project, it can be seen at CastleStrife.com. Thanks.

[Ovyron]

Does anyone know of a chess engine that can be used for a chess variant that uses a circular board? My game, Castle Siege Chess, uses a board that merges a 6x6 square board into the center of a circular board.

I have previously used Zillions of Games script to program it with high success, but Zillions costs $25 for anyone to be able to play my game and I can't manage to get it to work online. Jocly might work, but I am not good enough to figure out how to quickly program it using JavaScript and I don't think the Jocly site is back up yet after it was hacked. If anyone is interested in taking on my game as a project, it can be seen at CastleStrife.com. Thanks.

Hmm, some person cloned the lichess website and implemented Draughts into it so people can play Draughts instead of chess (at lidraughts.org), you'd probably want to research what they did and do it for Castle Siege and it'd have all the benefits that lichess already offers.

[gbtami]

Does anyone know of a chess engine that can be used for a chess variant that uses a circular board? My game, Castle Siege Chess, uses a board that merges a 6x6 square board into the center of a circular board.

I have previously used Zillions of Games script to program it with high success, but Zillions costs $25 for anyone to be able to play my game and I can't manage to get it to work online. Jocly might work, but I am not good enough to figure out how to quickly program it using JavaScript and I don't think the Jocly site is back up yet after it was hacked. If anyone is interested in taking on my game as a project, it can be seen at CastleStrife.com. Thanks.

You can try to contact https://greenchess.net author Uray M. János
He support several unusual board layout on his server already.