Hi, There occured a very strange move in of my darkchess games. My opponent played 1.e4 and I answered 1...Nf6, after that he played 2.e5! This is of course theory, but how can he know that? I could also have played 1...d6, and then he would already be lost after 1...dxe5. Is he just weak or does he know what is going on because of a cheat?

Lost after dxe5??????????????????????????
LOL! Can you explain this? You seem to be more materialistic than Maschess (an old program that was obsessed with material).
There is another option for your opponent: To just played a risky move and don't be weak or cheating........ Of cource there is the known option of giving Fencer $20.000 and let you see the game in light!

Pythagoras: Fencer only charge me $1,000/game you've been ripped. (J/K)

Doerdich: I'll give you a pass because you have only finished one game of dark chess. The fact is that a pawn down early is relatively meaningless so the move is not that risky. It's actually not common for someone to move 1...d6 in my experience.

On the other hand you would have seen the e5 move so how is it a cheat? Just move the knight.

Doerdich: You're whooping me in Extinction Chess and Grand Chess, but if you'd like a couple games of Dark Chess please drop a line. :)

As for his move, I don't see anything wrong with it. Even in regular Chess that opening is pretty famous. Taking a chance is sometimes winning strategy in Dark Chess. Losing strategy too, but that's a different story. d6 for the second move as Black is one of the worst moves you can make! That is unless you've blocked the diagonal to your King from the Queen throwing a check or moved your Queen's Rook Pawn to a5 to throw light on a4. If you're going to move your Queen's Pawn to d6 early in the game and don't want to chance White having placed his Queen on a4, you'd be wise to do it on your first move followed with B c8-d7 on your next move. A common Dark Chess opening and one that you never see in regular Chess. Remember, checks are not announced and your opponent can drape your King and the game is over.

@Walter Montego: 1...d6 might not be the best choice, but why then move 2.e5? I dont see any reason. Even to "hope" for 1...Nf6 is rubbish, because black sees the pawn on e5 and wont lose the knight. But anyway, it might be all luck and so lets see what happens next...

Doerdich: In your game you can see that he moved P e2-e4 after you moved your Knight to f6. You are right that if your first move was P d7-d6 and he moves to e5 with his Pawn you'll just take the Pawn and be in good shape. The thing is, you didn't move there. If your opponent is a beginner maybe he didn't know enough not to do it. If your opponent is a good player, maybe he was up to something or thought it would work against you in particular. If he's somewhere in between, who can say? Not every bad move in Dark Chess will be answered with the correct good move. Just wait until the game is over and replay the game with the lights on. You'll probably see a few moves that would be so ridiculous in a regular Chess game that you wonder how the players could be so stupid. Regular Chess openings work a lot different in Dark Chess. Some of the good openings in regular Chess work very poorly in Dark Chess because they require you to know where your opponent's pieces are to respond to them. Plus, some people like to bluff or just play bold and it can really frustrate a conservative player to have his pieces disappear without a trace.

I've played a few games of Dark Chess where my opponent and I played almost as if we could see the board and know where our opponent had moved. When you play a game like that, you'll know it's a good game. For some reason I don't seem to play as well any more, or my opponents have gotten better, or both. Still, it's a great game and I really wish I had a home version of it. Two monitors and one computer hooked to them would work just fine. Anybody got a Dark Chess program I can have or buy?

Walter Montego: Have you tried a piece of paper ... not that is low tech!

WhisperzQ: How would you play using paper without using the services of a third person, just the two players? With a third person you could set up three Chess boards and the third person would see everything. It'd be similiar to how I've read kliegspeil is played. I think a computer set up just like Dark Chess is here except for being able to play the game live or time it however you wanted to would be a great game to have. A computer would make it a lot easier to play and you wouldn't need to worry about having a third person when you wanted to play. It'd take a real smart and careful third to person to assist, too.

There is a Dark Chess game -the only that i'm aware- for Zillions of Games here.

The problem is that you can't have a fair game against the computer since at Zillions you can't hide the pieces from the computer and although for the human the game is correct the computer gets an unfair enormous advantage......
I will try one day to create a Dark Chess game! Indeed it is a very interesting game to play against a computer too......

Walter Montego: Sorry, I thought you meant you would be playing against someone else, but I can now see your need for a third person.

When I ws a kid (12-15) we used to play "mind chess" where we would sit back to back with a board between us (which we could not see). Each would call out their moves to the other and a third person would make the move on the board. It was not required to announce check (like dark chess) but if you had the abilty you could know when a King was exposed. It certainly sharpened your skills of memory, but not many wanted to play as it was extremely draining, even for kids.

WhisperzQ: I did mean playing against another person. Ol' Pythagoras is the one that misunderstood me, not you. I want to play Dark Chess against another person, live right here at home, or even over the internet if a site has it. I'd really like a home version though. Playing it that way would be lots of fun and I'm sure I could get people to play it.

I remember trying to play Chess without looking at the board and letting my brother look at the board. I believe it is called Blindfold Chess and people have given demonstrations of it. We were doing it to see if it'd work. It did until my brother (the guy looking at the board!) moved one of my pieces wrong when I called out my move. He further compounded the problem by naming his move wrong and then I was thoroughly lost and just went over to look at the mess on the board. We were using the descriptive notation and he'd somehow switched the Kings and Queens! We didn't try it again. I've heard of people being able to play a game like this to its completion and some chessmasters have given demonstrations of being able to play more than one game at a time blindfold style.

Walter Montego: yes, I can remember now also playing as the "blindfolded" player while the other was sighted ... We never wrote down the moves, but it was certainly easy to end up mystified because you thought a piece was in a certain location but it wasn't, at that point I would usually try to reconstrut the game from the begininng, okay if only 10-15 moves deep but if you were in the endgame a hopeless situation. In the openings and midgame they sighted person would not have too much of an advantage, but if the game went on and there was not that much left it became very hard.

Swapped K/Q, now there is a challenge! LOL.

Alekhin had a record of 32 simultaneous blind games, another master 52!

to anyone who enjoys playing extinction,please join my fellowship Extinction Chess Club.http://brainking.com/en/ShowFellowship?fid=186,you will be more then welcome.thanks

Marfitalu: Well, you want to castle with the rook a8 and kc8, right? "long castling" ... but what about the rook at d8? kicking off own rooks is not allowed :-)

Marfitalu: after the castle, the K will be on c8, the R on d8, but d8 is not free.

Marfitalu: You can castle, but your king would stay on c8 and your rook would go to d8, as in the usual long castle. So you would need to move the rook currently blocking d8 first.
Do you remember the rule which was hard to translate ? Here the "longest range", which must be free from other pieces, is a8-d8.

he whisperzQ . thnx for the info. i am new to the site , didnt know there had been soooo many discussions before about the game but in any case after playing just a few games i know for a fact that if i play the way i do , as black , i dont lose a single piece guaranteed and white never gets a shot at my king and i can checkmate the maharaja withing 30 moves evry time. its not that i dont like the game i do infact and that is the reason for my input. i just played a couple of games as white and won too but that was because the opponents were novices. in one game which i set as a 2 win match and started as black , my opponent used the exact same strategy i did as black and i could do nothing but lose the second game. lucky for me ill win the third but even though i know i cant lose any game playing as black , i was just hoping that htere be a way to even the game out so that i could play white with a chance of winning. i checked the ratings and the top players of maharaja only play as black. none of them excepts any invitations to play white and i guess all of them ( im about to be included in that list too ) are just lame enough to wait for an amateur to accept their games in the waiting room as white.

02i: I am no specialist of the field so I could be wrong, but from what I read it looks like about all games of the type "one against all" are forced wins for the player with the army - the classical example being "Fox and the gooses". The reason for it seems to be that if one of them wasn't, it would probably be a straightforward win by direct attack for the lone piece.
The lone piece being much easier to conduct than a set of pieces, such a game is more playable if it is unbalanced in favour of the army.

HalfPawn: White seems to have an advantage, but it doesn't seem to be overwhelming. I think the jury's still out though.

Even though the game is clearly a win for white in Horde Chess, I'm willing to try out black side against anyone for fun. Any takers?

WhisperzQ: I have a long time played blindfold with my parents, so that they have pieces. And i have wroted the moves, just to remove mistakes. With my chess fellows i have played on car on walking trips on playing site or somewhere. It is fun. In russia playing simultaneusly many blind fold games was even illegal some point, because it can be dangerous to the brains!

Salkkuman: I can undedrstand the many games at once frying your brains ... I expect even one game would fry mine now. Interesting comment about writing down the moves ... could you still see the moves as you went through the game? One of the challenges I always found was that at some point I would "forget" where a piece was and would have to reconstruct the moves from memory ... partly based on what I could remember and partly on what I expected they had been. This would, of course, be a lot easier if you could see a written record of the moves.

Hi variants players,

I am writing this for David Pritchard, who is close to finishing the second edition of his famous book "The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants". He is always looking for good sample games, and when I offered him to make this call on Brainking, he found it was an excellent idea. There are many variants played here and the turn-based type of play makes for better games than blitz.

The present message is a call for "best games" by the top BK players - I have no precise idea about what "top" means, but probably it should be thought as something like having been in the top 5 BKR in the variant played. Best games can be won, but also drawn or lost games. If you are interested that one of your games shows in the Encyclopedia of Chess Variants, just submit to me your one or two best games in each variant. All I need is the game id (or the link to the game, which looks like http://brainking.com/en/ArchivedGame?g=123456), given either in a PM to me or on that board.

The time delay for this is about one month. After that, David (and me!) will still be interested in seeing your best games, but he will not be able to include them in the book any more.

Thank you by advance for your inputs !

nabla: Do you have a list of the game variants which will be covered, or do we assume that it is all of them?

WhisperzQ: All variants played here ought to be covered. Variants where games are less likely to be included are the ones where it is most easy to get good games elsewhere, I would say Fischer Random, Xiangqi and Shogi. And in games where only the startposition is changed (like Fischer Random again), miniatures will probably be preferred, as long games will just look like normal chess.

nabla: Come to think of it, I've played some very good Dark Chess games. Too bad I didn't put stars next to them so that I'd be able to find them. I also came across an Extinction Chess game played by two other people that I'm sure your friend would include in his book. It involved promoting a Pawn to a King to win the game when the obvious move of promting to a Queen won't work. I wish I could remember where I saw that game. I'd send it right over to you. Perhaps one of the players invovled will see this post and remember the game. I'd like to check it out again.

Walter Montego: Sure that the king promotion would be a definite diagram in the book ! I would like to see it. Good Dark Chess games are also called for, I doubt that David Pritchard has any of them yet except for the one published in Variant Chess by the inventor.

nabla: Here's a couple to get the ball rolling between Walter and I that I think are quite good. Is that the kind of thing you're after?

http://brainking.com/en/ArchivedGame?g=593132&i=1
http://brainking.com/en/ArchivedGame?g=47630&i=1

and how about this Atomic game?

http://brainking.com/en/ArchivedGame?g=738624&i=1

grenv: Thank you ! I am all but expert in Dark Chess, but yes, I think that is what we are after. Unfortunately the Atomic game is a private one, so I would need the PGN score (here or by PM).

grenv: and how about this Atomic game?

Wow it should be a nice game! Too bad we can't see it.......

Pythagoras: I have no idea why it is private, I would never willingly agree to such a game, but I also don't check carefully apparently.

I messaged you the PGN. If anyone else is interested let me know.

grenv: Thank you for that game, it looks really great, and I advice everybody to ask for the PGN !
Total agreement with you, to make a game private is IMHO a feature which should not exist.

nabla: For Dark Chess games to be shown in a book, you might want to advise him to show all three looks of the board on certain moves. I wish we had that option here for reviewing a finished game. Sometimes with the whole board shown the moves look ridiculous and you have to remember that the players can't see the whole picture.

HalfPawn: It is called "Loop Chess" here.

andreas: no, that's crazyhouse, or almost, because crazyhous has a different rule from loop chess concerning promoted pieces. Bughouse is very different, it's a 2 against 2 game played on 2 boards.have a look Here for the rules.

Does it make sense to allow bishop promotion in los alamos chess, since there is no bishop in this game?

Walter Montego: You are right, for the reader to get a right grasp over Dark Chess, at least one game position should be shown in all three views.

mangue: No

posting in the 8x8 forum is definitely inappropriate, sorry. but thanks socrates for your opinion. So it does not make sense, and was not possible in the earliest version. But is it legal?

mangue: It should not be possible. Did it happen in a game on BrainKing?

Fencer: I think mangue was requesting an option to promote a pawn to a bishop - but if brainking wants to keep los alamos chess authentic then that shouldn't be an option :)

No Fencer, it did not happened. And if it is not allowed, than it is good so, because the rules said, there is no bishop in the game.

mangue: Quite right, or I'll start promoting to an archbishop in regular chess!

grenv: You can't do that in any case, Ed would bounce on you with a lawsuit.

too bad Capa can't sue him...