new there at gothicchess.at:
- chapter with games (intro)
- first games (for testing java tool)
(all in german)

It works great, but the pieces are kind of hard to tell apart. The archbishop and chancellor look most similar.

CardinalFlight: in will change the pieces soon

Caissus: That's an Einhorn (unicorn)!
http://homepages.compuserve.de/uwdacoma/JanusMarsh1.jpg

gotti2000: No gotti ,that is the official "Janus" piece.
BTW it is only important, that you have two additional pieces for your piecesset. Then you can use them as Janus,AB,Chancellor,Wizard,for the Chinese Chess or whatever

Caissus: Sorry, didn't know that. I'm rather new to all this chessvariants. Didn't even know that there are so many! Well, looks like I'm not the only one who mixed that up:
http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/janus.html
"The extra pieces of this game, the Januses, look like knights with some extra `pin' put on their head, making them look a little like unicorns."

Uwe, I would have a questions for you just to satisfy my own interest. Who came up with standards like this Janus-look? Is there somethink like a Janus Chess Federation in place? Can you link me to some 'History of Janus Chess'?

Thanks,

Gotti

gotti2000: I would suggest we switch to the Janusboard...

you can look here : http://www.janusschach.de/
But the Januschessfederation is very inactive at the moment. The best is to look at chessvariants.com or ...here.At the moment I am collecting games on my page,please look at my profile.

Ol' fencer is thinking of merger this board with that one. The games are almost the same from a surface look anyway. They certainly play a lot differently than each other though. I suppose if you're just going to talk about Janus Chess without any connection to Gothic Chess you might as well take it to the Janus board. You are just talking about the sets and pieces themselves and it seems relevant to me.

Caissus: Does the Janus Chess site have an English link?

Walter Montego: No Walter, it is in German only.

Caissus: That's too bad, as I can't read German. Oh well. I like Janus Chess, though I'm still having problems playing it better. The game is harder than it looks. Them sneaky Januses. :)

Walter Montego: I think the most important informations,you can also find here or at chessvariants.com

At my website http://www.gothicchess.at/ you can find a list with links related to gothic chess! plese let me know if you know more, either with a message here or per mail: info@gothicchess.at !

to schachmdmt:
Link to ChessV: http://sourceforge.net/projects/chessv/
Link to TSCPGothic: http://www.xs4all.nl/~mlngveld/gothicchess/index.html
a beta link to Smirf: http://www.chessbox.de/beta.html

Sumerian: thanks sumerian! i added the two links!

Am I still hidden here?

ughaibu: I see you. ;-)

ughaibu: I unbanned you right after becoming moderator back in August, wasn't it? I remember sending you a message saying so. You replied that you weren't going to use this board any more, but did thank me for unbanning you.
Hi, and welcome back.

Who is that Golden horseman ? A chess player.

King August II The Strong (German August II der Starke, Polish August II Mocny) (May 12, 1670 - February 1, 1733) was an influential Saxon nobleman and monarch. He held the titles Elector of Saxony and King of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Born in Dresden, Saxony, August was the son of John George III Wettin who was born in 1647 to the house of Wettin. He was the Elector of Saxony, one of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire. His tropps defeated the Turks at Vienna which marked the end of their invasion in Europe.

August´s mother was Anne Sophie of Denmark. In 1694, he became Elector of Saxony as Prince-Elector Friedrich August I. von Sachsen. Following the death of the Polish king John III Sobieski, August was converted to Catholicism and elected king of Poland in 1697 with the help and support of Russia and Austria. The legality of the election was questioned by some Poles.

As a result of defeats in the war with Sweden and the pro-Swedish party in Poland, August had to abdicate in 1706 in favour of Stanis³aw Leszczyñski. But after the Swedish defeat in the Battle of Poltava, he was reintroduced as King of Poland in 1709. One of his sons, Friedrich August II. followed him first as Elector of Saxony , then as August III of Poland, King of Poland.

August II was called August the Strong for his bearlike strength and also for his numerous offspring. It is sometimes written that he sired 365 children. Although this figure would be extremely difficult to verify, August II did father a very large number of illegitimate children, the most famous of whom was Maurice de Saxe (with Aurora von Königsmarck), the brilliant French military commander.

He successfully set out to discover the secret of the "White Gold", as the porcelain he produced in Dresden and Meissen was called. He also gathered many of the best architects and painters from all over Europe in Dresden, and his rule marks the beginning of Dresden's development as a leading centre of technology and art. August's body was buried in Poland --all but his heart, which is in Dresden castle.

Okay, thanks.

I am wondering if we could have it changed to either look like the Archbishop on Gothic Chess or Sumerian's double sword icon on his site? The strange smirking doglike figure just doesn't jibe with how I think of the piece. If those icons aren't acceptable, how about a horse's head with a bishop's mitre on it. Kind of like how that Janus Chess site of Caissus has the piece for the set itself. Or how does Grand Chess represent the Cardinal in that game. Perhaps someone with a Grand Chess set could photograph the piece on profile and we could use it for the icon. Maybe someone could come up with a good icon? Who made the one we have now? Who, who, let the dogs out? :)

http://caissus.gmxhome.de/WJanus.jpg
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/BJanus.jpg
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/bcardinal.jpg
http://caissus.gmxhome.de/wcardinal.jpg

Caissus: That's it Caissus. I think both look a lot better than what we have now. The Cardinal is exactly the piece itself. Do you think they'd be easy to tell apart from the Knights on the same board? If so, are there others that feel as I do about the doglike thing and can we get fencer to change the symbol? If it's just me, it probably not worth the trouble. Or maybe it can be made so that the user picks the style of symbol on his page as he does with the rest of the Chess board set up?

This is a good idea that the user picks the symbol.
For me the current Janus piece icon is very funny and whenever i look at it my feelings change positive!
So i like the piece......
I also find its smile smirking, like it makes fun of us playing the game......

But look the Janus piece again! Look it's smiling with so much silliness that it should make you laugh!! It's a damn of a piece for me!

Chessmaster1000: If we could pick the icons, then you could keep using it and I could switch. The best of both worlds, eh?

I think the previous icon is also a little bit blurred ?

Caissus: He's blurry, all right! He snuck out of the yard last night and didn't come home until feeding time this morning. Bad boy! :)
Maybe it's those Dalmation spots on him that makes him look that way.

Walter Montego:

... ... and that appears as rare nowadays ... ~*~ ...

<Or does knopp just have the same name ? ;-)
I accepted the challenge and my plan is to totally destroy his positions to make him love Gothic Chess. >:-) I had a last chess tournament rating of ELO 1600, so probably I will ask somebody for help. It can be higher now, but still too low, I am afraid.

I gave him some tips how to play. Maybe he can need it. ;-)

http://brainking.com/game/Tournaments?trg=6703&tri=25674&trnst=0

Watchers don´t need to be logged in.

Dresden: have a look at http://www.gothicchess.at/ - i am building up the tournament revival there.

I am schachmdmt from Vienna and I am following up the big tournament at my homepage http://www.gothicchess.at/ .
There you can watch the sections, games (comments planned; online you can replay themoutside of brainking) and so on. Klick on the main menu point "Trice's Turnier (DE)" for using german language , "Trice's Tourn. (ENG)" for english.I am planning pages about the players with games too. If you want, you can send me a pic or text or annotations or whatever interesting to

info@gothicchess.at

Please help me by sending finished results, games, annotations and so on!

Yours sincerely

schachmdmt

It looks like a diseased wolf to me.

Sorry, it seems to be impossible to display such pictures directly. (Janus = Archbishop)

http://www.chessbox.de/Compu/schachveri1_e.html

I went to gothicchess.at and saw some of the games at the tournament on 01/15/2005 and was quite pleased to see that the option exists for looking at several "live" games as they are progressing. Some are complete; it is good to see the gamescores and play through the games. Well done!

Nasmichael: Thank you! I am doing my job and hope in a well way.
Every evening i will update games and results. if someone finds errors in games (pgn, online) please send me a message or a mail to info@gothicchess.at

by the way: i will add english in general as a language of gothicchess.at too. why that? because some people asked me ...

As I understand it, part of the raison d’être for the creation of Gothic Chess was to reduce the proportion of draws. Certainly in modern grandmaster chess there are very many draws. But is this necessarily a bad thing? I want to challenge that notion.

It is true that at the highest levels draws are very common. But who does this matter to? Does it matter to the grandmasters? Or, if we are honest, does it really matter more to us, the spectators, the readers of chess journals, the Class A to Class D players that populate the chess clubs throughout the world? We like the action. We like to see a win. But how do the players feel about it?

Here’s my honest opinion. I’m a serious club player, currently restarting chess after a gap of more than a decade, and if I look at the games I’ve played over the years in matches, leagues and tournaments, which games have given me the greatest satisfaction? Very definitely, the games I have enjoyed most have been the hard fought draws. For me there is a much greater satisfaction in the struggle with a worthy opponent where both are really trying to win but that eventually ends in impasse, than my taking advantage of some blunder and getting a slightly hollow victory.

Chess games at the level of the great masses are lost rather than won, and a draw can often show that both players played well. So why would I be interested in a chess variant that claimed to reduce the possibility of my enjoying what for me are the best kind of games? If the game doesn’t stand on its own two feet and instead has to compare itself to its parent to justify its existence then it’s a poor kind of game.

Stormerne: I hadn't given it much thought. This Gothic Chess has less draws I'd be willing to bet. And I'm sure it's because there's more power on the board, but the King is the same piece as in regular Chess. You also have to take into consideration that not very many people play this game, nor are there hundreds of years of study of it even though it's been around for over a hundred. Not quite set up as this, but the same pieces and rules. It's just nobody much played Bird's Chess, nor fifty years later did they played Capablnca's Chess. Now there's Gothic Chess, and it is more widely played of the three, but still it quite small compared to regular Chess. If the patent holder is right and Gothic Chess does become the mainstream version of Chess in a few years, all those millions of players will produce lots of good players and I imagine the percentage of draws will go up. It's a lot harder for people to play this game well compared to regular Chess. I'm sure that lowers the amount of draws too. One thing that is changing all Chess type games is computers. I'm sure if Gothic Chess does get popular with the masses, more computer time will be put into the study of it. With computers getting more powerful everyday, they'll catch up to this game a lot faster than it took them to almost master regular Chess.

Walter, i wanted to reply but you just said exactly all my thoughts. Nothing to add.......

Walter Montego: You say, "It's a lot harder for people to play this game compared to regular Chess." If that is this case, won't that restrict the numbers who take up Gothic Chess? I'm well aware that Ed's business model is that his variant will become the mainstream version. But if what you say is true then it won't happen. The reason that people DON'T play regular Chess at the moment is not because it doesn't give them sufficient challenge! For many it's too complex already.

Gothic Chess is not (felt, when playing) more complex, it´s both infinite, but GC is broader. in the same moment Chess 64 is deeper. It´s harder to follow a good game as visitor. At the beginning I felt the same as you. But now I can blow away the very most all-games-players on this server even when sleeping despite I am only a tournament ELO 1580 Chess Player (this is about 2000 typically claimed ELO-points in chess forums). I would claim Gothic Chess is more like real life, the thoughts are not too abstract and freaky, it´s all about mobility despite the tactics can overwhelme somebody at the beginning. But if both players have the same level (round about) then they will see both the same things, Gothic Chess is often much easier than the deep, deep game of chess that looks so plain compared to GC. I stopped playing chess some years ago, all those eager boys bored me, whyever, I play Gothic, I hope it gets en vogue. Maybe chess is better, but it´s not attractive for me to look for a weak pawn all he time.

Stormerne: Although I am a fan of GC I must say that for many beginners in chess it would be better first to become a better chessplayer and then to learn the more complicated game of GC with his two more pieces and the bigger board.

Stormene,you are right with your opinion, many (good) chessplayers have said to to me: "Why should I play this bigger chessgame,if I am so a bad player in the original chess?"
(Mostly the good chessplayers know that they play bad, and mostly the bad players are thinking that they play good :-)).

I don`t think that GC will become the mainstream of chess in the near future, it is a really interesting game but it will be only a game for a few and not for many! It has to do with the patent and with the fact that chess itsself is not solved.

Don't get me wrong... I actually like Gothic Chess! And I think it will succeed up to a point, though not necessarily for the reasons surrounding draws as stated in the Ed's paper. I'd like to be upfront about why it's a good game, and I think it's got a slightly better chance of public success if the thing about the draws is NOT pushed as it has been in the past.

Caissus: You make me think of another question. In the future, if GC does grow, there'll probably be players who start on GC and then migrate to chess. (I bet everybody here has gone the other way so far.) But if and when that does happen, I wonder what their opinions of chess will be and how they will justify such a transition?

Draws to me are a waste of my time;I always play to win. Draws are absolutely unsatisfying and I consider them much worse than a defeat.

tedbarber: why not playing a draw? when i am good in a match or tournament i often offer draw in positions which are a little bit better.
but the most opponent rejected these offers and i almost won.
i play many draws, but not short. alomost 20-30 moves. thats ok in my opinion.
to play draw is ok.

The reason why chess games often end up in draws is because it has been studied so much. Any standard opening book will now show openings analyzed to over 20 moves. Grandmasters spend a lot of time memorizing opening lines and variations. This type of play is not appealing to the average player because it requires lenghty study and a lot of memory work. Even middle game setups are now analyzed in great detail, and often openings are studied along the lines of "white has a slight advantage that could give a win, while black plays to try to draw the game". Gothic chess does not have such lengthy analysis of openings, but there is already an "opening book" and it is part of the programming in Gothic Vortex. Of course the opening book is not widely available, unless you buy the program and bother to write the openings as you play them against the computer. As openings are analyzed to even deeper numbers of moves, other variants will beomce more popular. Gothic chess will be one of them, along with Janus, loop and other random variants of chess.