Is a gargantua simply too powerful?

One of the incredible things about chess is how well it plays, to put it simply. It plays so well, it's hard to fathom how it could ever have been invented. It almost seems to have been created by some higher power, for the education, edification, and entertainment of us mortals. There's always more to learn, no matter how much you've played. It's impossible to imagine how chess could be improved. Chess is already a perfect game.

This begs a question - given the perfection of chess, why have I tried to come up with a chess variant? I was asked this question recently, and had no immediate reply. I still have no clear one. I think that at its core, Gargantua is my homage to chess; a love letter to chess, if you will. I will never stop loving chess, and I will never stop playing chess.

Does this mean I'm giving up on Gargantua? No. I'm still interested in finding out how good a game Gargantua is, and until I find out, I'm not going anywhere :-) My current suspicion is that I've made the gargantua too powerful a piece to allow for the creation of long mating sequences. I also suspect I've made the gargantua too powerful a piece to allow for the kind of brilliancies we see in chess. Even if both of these suspicions prove to be correct, Gargantua might still be a fun, entertaining, and viable game to play. We'll see!

Puzzle of the day: below is a Gargantua helpmate-in-one puzzle; what is Black's helping move, and White's checkmate reply?

 update: here's the solution

Death from Above

In the 1985 movie "Rocky IV", the nickname of the Russian boxer Ivan Drago is "Death from Above". He got it after his prizefight with Apollo Creed resulted in Apollo's death. "Death from Above" would also be an apt nickname for a knight move in a standard chess game which checkmates the opposing king; the death is "from above" since it's impossible to interpose a piece to thwart a knight's attack. A knight's threat to any piece, including the king, drops down on it from the sky like a bomb, and the only way to avoid it is by moving the piece, if that's even possible. Applying this to Gargantua, any gargantua move which moves the gargantua to a square from which it checks the opposing king via its knight powers, and results in the checkmate of the opposing king, qualifies as a "Death from Above" move.

Puzzle of the day: below is a Gargantua helpmate-in-one puzzle; what is Black's helping move, and White's checkmate reply?

update: here's the solution

Helpmates

I won't post any more Gargantua mate-in-one puzzles, as they're so simple to solve. I'll continue to post Gargantua mate-in-two puzzles, which of course are slightly harder to solve. I'll also try my hand at constructing Gargantua helpmate puzzles, starting with this post. helpmate-in-one puzzles are slightly harder than mate-in-one puzzles, since the solution requires an initial move by Black before White can move, which is precisely where the help comes in :-)

Puzzle of the day: below is a Gargantua helpmate-in-one puzzle; what is Black's helping move, and White's checkmate reply?

update: here's the solution

Gargantua vs. gargantua

To make this post more understandable, I need to make a distinction between "Gargantua" and "gargantua". Whenever I use "Gargantua", I'm referring to the chess variant as a whole. Whenever I use "gargantua", I'm referring to the piece. Just to be crystal clear: a legal Gargantua move is a move made by any piece which is a legal Gargantua move, whereas a legal gargantua move is a move made by a gargantua which is a legal Gargantua move.

The Gargantua mate-in-one problems I've posted so far have all come from actual games I've played, but none of those games were Gargantua games; they were actually all standard chess games. What I did was to truncate the games if necessary, so that only legal Gargantua moves remained. For example, if a game was 20 moves long, but White made an illegal Gargantua move on move 10, I would truncate the game after 9 moves by each player. If Black made an illegal Gargantua move on move 10, I would truncate the game after White's 10th move.

A fair percentage of the time, the illegal Gargantua move would be due to the player who was to move having just been checkmated. Of course, by definition, any move attempted to be made by a player who has just been checkmated is illegal :-) Also, any move attempted to be made by a player who has just been put in check, and which does not get that player out of check, is illegal; another fair percentage of the time, the illegal Gargantua move would be due to this.

Since every standard chess game can be converted to a Gargantua game by means of this truncation process, it's easy to manufacture Gargantua games at will; however, these will not be particularly interesting games, since they won't have been played under the Gargantua rules.

The long and short of it is that I have a limitless supply of Gargantua mate-in-one problems, but very few of them (if any) could have come into being by players who were actually playing under the Gargantua rules.

Due to the lack of bona fide Gargantua games, I still don't know if Gargantua is a viable chess variant or not. I need chess players to check it out!

Puzzle of the day: how does Black mate in two here (or in three, if White gives up material)?

update: here's the solution

Never Let Me Go

One of the pleasures of writing a blog is the opportunity to use the titles of works you admire as titles of your posts. Of course, this can't be done arbitrarily; the title of each post must be relevant to its content. Today's title is in homage to Kazuo Ishiguro's superb science fiction novel "Never Let Me Go". Although Gargantua is in its infancy, I already have the very strong impression that one must keep one's gargantua at all costs, since it can end the game in a thunderbolt. I never want to let my gargantua go!

Puzzle of the day: how does White mate in one here?

update: here's the solution

What is a gargantua worth?

I haven't yet decided how much a gargantua is worth, but can make a reasonable initial approximation, using the well-established values for pieces in a standard chess game as a guide. As we know, queens have the ability to make any legal rook move and also any legal bishop move. So an initial approximation of the value of a queen would be the sum of the value of a rook and the value of a bishop. The well-established value of a rook is 5 and the well-established value of a bishop is 3, so an initial approximation of the value of a queen would be 8. However, the well-established value of a queen is 9. This is a classic example of the adage "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." :-)

As we also know, gargantuas have the ability to make any legal queen move and also any legal knight move. So an initial approximation of the value of a gargantua would be the sum of the value of a queen and the value of a knight. The well-established value of a queen is 9 and the well-established value of a knight is 3, so an initial approximation of the value of a gargantua would be 12. Applying the adage again, a more precise approximation of the value of a gargantua would be 1 more than the initial approximation, i.e., 13. Fortunately, I don't have triskaidekaphobia :-)

It remains to be seen what the well-established value of a gargantua will eventually be, and that will require a consensus; I can't be the arbiter of what the value will be. The beautiful thing about such a question is that there is a correct answer, it's just not known yet!

Puzzle of the day: how does White mate in one here?

 update: here's the solution

Iteration four

After playing a bunch of iteration three games, I decided that even a 10x8 board was too big. Then I had an epiphany - if I made Gargantua a game which could be played with existing chess boards and chess pieces, there would be no barrier to entry for any chess player anywhere in the world to try it out. That was the genesis of iteration four. With this iteration, it became possible to define Gargantua in a single sentence:

Gargantua is a chess variant where all the normal rules of chess apply, with the addition that the queen (now called a gargantua) has the ability to make legal knight moves as well as legal queen moves.

It would be silly for me to include a screenshot of the opening position of a Gargantua game, as it would be indistinguishable from the opening position of a normal chess game. However, it wouldn't be silly at all to include screenshots of positions in Gargantua games where a mate in one is possible, but wouldn't be possible in a normal chess game.

Puzzle of the day: how does Black mate in one here?

Note: the reason the board is purple is that in my Gargantua app I added the optional capability to change the color of the board to indicate various situations, and purple is the indicator for a mate in one. Blue is the indicator that a mate has occurred.

update: here's the solution

Iterations two and three

I played a bunch of Gargantua games against myself using the first iteration of my Gargantua app, and realized that I needed to make the gargantuas more powerful. I removed their ability to make bigger leaps, but added the ability for them to move like a queen in addition to their ability to move like a knight. They were now the most powerful pieces  on the board.

I played a bunch more games against myself using the second iteration, and realized it made no sense for each player to have two gargantuas; there should be only one most powerful piece on the board for each player, as there is in standard chess. Therefore, I decided to make the following changes:

- change the board size from 10x10 to 10x8

- remove one gargantua from each player

- add another queen for each player

- put the queens in the corners, where the gargantuas used to be

- put the gargantuas where the queens used to be

Here's what my initial board for iteration three looked like:

 

Hello world

A little over two years ago, I started working on a chess variant I call Gargantua. My initial idea was to add a new piece (a gargantua) which could move like a knight, but had the additional ability to make bigger hops. A knight can hop to any square that is two squares away from its current square vertically and one square horizontally, or one square vertically and two squares horizontally. I decided that a gargantua can do the same, but can also hop to any square that is three squares away from its current square vertically and two squares horizontally, or two squares vertically and three squares horizontally. At first I decided to use a 10x10 board, where each player got two gargantuas, located at the corners of the player's back rank. I embedded an inner 8x8 board inside the 10x10 board which had all the other pieces in the standard chess configuration. Here's what my initial board looked like at the start of a game:

 I hadn't created bitmaps for the gargantuas yet, so I reused the knight bitmaps in different colors to represent them.