Big Chess 16x16

[Rubinus]

http://www.zimbio.com/member/chessbumbu ... FICGS+site

Some concept for board presentation? 16x16, 18x18, or other?
My guess for figur value: N=3, B=6(!), R=10-12, Q=22-28.

[hgm]

Why the large difference between Bishop and Rook? I see no reason why their relative value should change on square boards of any size. In fact I think B + 2 connected passers should have the advantage here against R, just like in normal Chess. How deep the board is does not really matter. What matters is if I can force them forward. If I can, it only takes longer if the board is deeper, but the eventual result will be the same. How wide the board is does not matter at all if there are no pieces there.

Q probably gets weaker relative to R, as KQKR would be no longer a win.

I did not find any clear rules for this game. What is the initial setup? Do you get two Kings, or three Queens, or do you simply leave an open space where the second King would have been? Can any of the four Rooks castle?

[Uri Blass]

I found the following information:

http://www.ficgs.com/big-chess_en_wiki.html

each player's pieces comprise sixteen pawns, six knights, four bishops, four rooks, one queen and one king. Rules are the same than in western chess, except castling is not possible.

I do not understand from it what is the initial position.

[hgm]

I looked to some tournament games stored on that server, and one of the games was resigned without playing. As the site shows the final position, that gave me the start position. It is

rnb1rbnqkbnbr1bnr/pppppppnnppppppp/7pp7/16/16/16....

I was not sure if there was any limitation on the rnge of the sliders; I suppose not: in the games I saw some moves over pretty large distance.

[Onno Garms]

My guess for figur value: N=3, B=6(!), R=10-12, Q=22-28.

What does Zillions say on the piece values?

[jshriver]

Nifty but how do you actually play it on ficgs?

Guessing this needs a special client.
-Josh

[hgm]

I think this is correspondence chess at one move per day. S they might not use a real client. ust upload the move to the server as text, and the server seems to render the currend game position. (At least, this is wht it has for all finished games: you get to see the final positions.)

To handle this on WinBoard I had to recompile with a larger BOARD_RANKS than the default (17 in stead of 11; WinBoard uses one dummy rank to store castling and e.p rights). But then it can display this 16x16 board, (by going to the File -> New Variant... menu, choosing variant "normal"and asking for 16 files and ranks). Then I was actually able to paste a FEN of the initial position. (Initially the board will be empty if you select a non-standard number of files.) I even could do moves, and they are correctly converted to PGN. (That is, correctly from WinBoard's point of view: on FICGS they seem to skip the i-file, and start counting ranks at 1.) Reading PGN might be a problem, though. I don't think the WinBoard parser supports double-digit move numbers.

I have no engine for it, though. Fairy-Max is limited to 8 ranks.

[hgm]

[tano-urayoan]

Nifty but how do you actually play it on ficgs?

Guessing this needs a special client.
-Josh

Via your browser.