Fairy Chess Chess.com

[Giuliana]

Arethere any sites that have board editors that involve fairy pieces? I noticed that all the board editors I've seen only allow me to put regular chess pieces on the board, and not fairy pieces. I was also wondering about board editors that involve fairy pawns, such as pawns that only move and capture diagonally forward.

There is a simple board editor using the Alfaerie piece set in one of the comments to . After you press the 'draw' button there it will show the designed diagram as a single PNG image on the page. This can then be copied by normal means. (E.g. for FireFox I right-click it and select 'Copy Image' from the context menu to get it on the clipboard.) After that you can paste it into your favorite drawing program on whatever OS you are using, and save it as a file in the format you need.

I don't understand what you are asking. A Board Editor is a program for making static images; promoting is an action. I you want to make a diagram containing promoted pieces, you just put the promoted pieces in there.

The editor itself is implemented using another web-script, the interactive diagram. This is an on-line user interface for chess (variants), where you can move pieces around over a board or drop them on it from a table. It can be made aware of how the pieces move, (to highlight the possible destination squares) and indeed on how (and where) they promote. The description page at the link contains a 'design wizard' for creating such diagrams with the desired rules, so you can include them in your own HTML pages. (You cannot paste them in forums, though; these in general do not allow posting of such active elements.) For the purpose of editing a board it did not seem useful to have pieces promote, so I conigured the diagram used as input to not have a promotion zone.

@ZhenyaChaynikov: The Board Editor makes use of an on-line graphics engine that renders SVG pieces (at any desired size) as a PGN image of a board of custom dimensions. (Can be 1x1 for individual pieces on transparent background.) The original Alfaerie piece set consisted of 50x50 GIF images. So I had to redraw them as SVG to use them for this purpose. But I did not redraw every Alaerie piece that was ever designed. In particular the Ultima pieces are not available as SVG (yet).

These were not in the original Alfaerie set, so there are not even designs for those, let alone in SVG format. If you can post the required SVG images (nominal size 2048x2048, filling color #f9f9f9ff RGBA) here, I can upload them to the server where the graphics engine runs.

I adjusted the movement of some of the pieces for this position. The king moves like a royal Ferz. The Kangaroo moves like a Camelrider. The camel Bird is a Bishop+Dabbabarider+Camelrider making it the most powerful piece. The Lion is a Bishop+Dabbabarider. The Tiger is a Camel+Bishop. The Unicorn is a Dabbabarider+Camel. The squirrel has the movement gCC meaning it moves like an extended camel, but only to squares that are immediately beyond a piece, in the path of a Camelrider, meaning it is a type of hopper. The pegasus has the movement gB, and is a diagonal hopper, that moves one square beyond a piece diagonally. The Ram has the movement CgDD, meaning it combines the movement of the Camel and the Dabbaba Hopper, moving either as a camel, or to the square immediately beyond a piece in the path of a Dabbabarider. The pawns move one square diagonally forward, but capture two squares diagonally forward, and so have the movement fmFfcA. Everything else moves the same as it's default movement.

Ugh, I cannot directly paste that URL in a posting here, as the forum sotware converts the link to https. The image does appear in the submission editor, but once the message is posted, it does not appear in the posting.

I found that it's also possible to get a board with 200 by 200 squares, which means that if each player had a piece on 1/4 of the board each player would have 10,000 pieces, making each army the size of a city.

I came across the term in the oxford companion to chess (very good reference for terms, openings, and historical players). It did explain what it was but i still do no understand what it means. Also may somebody explain what a fairy problem and fairy mate is. I dont think they have to do with fairy marrige's.

Not just different pieces. Fairy chess also includes variants with different rules - e.g. Andernach chess (pieces that capture change colours), Circe (pieces that get captured respawn somewhere on the board, location and delay determined by the exact Circe variant), monochromatic (pieces cannot move from light squares to dark, and vice versa), etc.

That is a very debatabe statement. There exist many variants with fairy pieces that are highly playable and very well designed. And then I am not talking about the World's major Chess variants like Xiangqi, Shogi or Makruk. But Gothic Chess, Spartan Chess and most flavors of Chess with Different Armies are examples of variants employing fairy pieces.

For those who would like to test those claims for themselves: the Fairy-Max engine that is packaged with the WinBoard Chess GUI plays many of these variants in addition to orthodox Chess, at a level that should be beatable by a good player. You would just have to select them from the New Variant menu.

Fairy chess is not a clearly defined term; the best definition I can come up is "a chess variant". This involves pretty much everything starting from Chess960 to Capablanca chess to circe chess, but some people will probably disagree with me (mostly regarding Chess960).

Remellion's statement is correct to some extent, depending on the variants. Some variants are intended to be playable, while others are intended to be strictly theoretical (only to the world of chess problems) where playing it will most likely cause confusion.

I concede there are many playable fairy variants. Capablanca chess, and most variants with adding/replacing a fairy piece or allowing promotion to fairy pieces should be playable. Bearing less resemblance to normal chess, bughouse, losing/suicide, and atomic/bomb are common, and Alice, Augsburg and possibly some Circe variants may be playable.

Equally, there are many unplayable "problemist" variants, particularly those in retroproblems - some types of Circe may be lousy, Grid, Einstein, monochromatic and generally anything with a silly or obscure name is probably broken for normal play.

I would not associate Chess variants that use orthodox pieces but differ in other rules from orthodox Chess (such as Crazyhouse, Atomic, Suicide, 3Check, King of the Hill) with 'Fairy Chess'. But that might be personal.

I dislike the term 'fairy' - I would prefer something like 'variant' or 'unorthodox'. Blame T.R. Dawson - a great composer with an incredible imagination - but also the guy who voted for 'fairy' as well as 'S' being the letter used for a Knight in english notation for chess problems [a grave PR mistake that haunts English problem publications to this day].

The matter is not entirely without relevance, as I am trying to design a classification of Chess variants, in connection with automatically registering installed engines in GUIs that could use them, on Linux. (On most GUIs this currently requires some user action, where he would have to browse to the engine executable, and give some info about it.) The classification would serve to allow the user to select only automatic registration of engines that play games he is interested in, so that die-hard Chess users would not be annoyed by Xiangqi or Shogi engines, etc.

Of course all the World's major Chess variants would be in classes of their own (chess, xiangqi, shogi). Chess960 also seems deserving of a class of its own, ratherthan being grouped with other variants, as there would be many people interested in just chess + chess960.

For other variants I was thinking to split them up in 'antichess' (losers, suicide, giveaway, with mandatory acpture), 'dropchess' (crazyhouse, bughouse, pocket knight), goalchess (orthodox except for the winning condition, like 3checks, king of the hill, reach last rank, perhaps knightmate), historic (predecessors of western Chess, like shatranj and courier chess, perhaps tamerlane chess) fairychess (participation of non-orthodox pieces, e.g. Capablanca, Seirawan, chess with different armies, team-mate chess), weirdchess (with pretty drastic rule modifications, e.g. atomic, twokings), aseanchess (Thai, Cambodean and Birman Chess). And of course xiangqi, shogi and shogivariants (chu shogi, tori shogi, mini-shogi) for non-western variants.

1) Fairy chess is a popular variant of chess where one of the players (usually weaker) does nothing but try to trade everything off the board making for an exceptionally dull game. This first variant of fairy chess is quite misleading, in that the player (again, usually weaker) is misleaded into thinking their prospects for a win get greater with each piece that is needlessly traded off. Like fairys, this concept is not real; an old-wives-tale at best.

2) Variant two of fairy chess requires a silent agreement between both players in which one player locks up the pawns simply for the sake of locking up the pawns, and the other one allows it because the pawn locker (often times weaker, and or an idiot) is alluded into believing he can get some unrealistic attack going. This simply isn't true. These games usually result in a lot of time burning, and excessive piece re-arrangement. This variant doesn't so much depend on playing strength, as it depends on sheer cowardness and fairy-like beliefs.

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