[HN Gopher] I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geom...
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I realized chess pieces can be redesigned to be geometric attack
directions
Author : aa_is_op
Score : 225 points
Date : 2024-01-25 12:36 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| I thought this would be about redesigning their movement to make
| a new kind of game. But it's only the shape of the pieces.
|
| That said, I'd use a square for the rooks so they don't get
| confused with the bishops as they get moved and maybe an L shape
| for the knights. It would definitely make it easy for beginners
| to learn how each piece moves.
| floren wrote:
| > It would definitely make it easy for beginners to learn how
| each piece moves.
|
| Which is more or less the easiest part of the game to learn,
| and one which pretty much anybody will have down after one or
| maybe two games.
|
| It's a clever little idea to share on Twitter but in practice I
| think it would make the board slower to read for advanced
| players, because so many pieces look similar.
| trgn wrote:
| Exactly, this will reduce readability of a board. It's like
| highlighting the black key notes on sheet music. You think
| you're making it easier, but end up just adding too much
| redundant info and it clutters the page. Or like adding a ton
| of crufty comments to code ("// this is a loop that ... ").
| Or like adding a "fill these. with water" post-it notes on an
| icecube tray. Clever. But worse.
| Dig1t wrote:
| This is fantastic, I would love to try playing a game with these
| pieces. I think this could improve accessibility and also make
| the game less intimidating for newcomers.
| lemmsjid wrote:
| It would be interesting to do an experiment on people playing one
| another (online) with these pieces vs regular pieces (e.g. one
| player with a regular set and one player with this set). Because
| I do feel like I can visualize the state of the board more easily
| with this approach--but would that translate across people into
| better play, or is there some point where a more expert player (I
| don't play very often, though I enjoy playing and have played for
| years) has already internalized the mapping from piece shape to
| movement. But that said, it does feel like the difference between
| font styles in programming, which for me have a very meaningful
| impact over time.
|
| Edit: Though good point to the parallel commenters, the knight
| shape is harder to differentiate and kind of throws me off. But
| maybe tweaks there.
| sleeplessworld wrote:
| The knight shape does seem off. But it avoids the piece being a
| sun symbol / fascist tribute piece :-)
| donkeybeer wrote:
| It shouldn't look like that, its two I's at 90 degrees: https
| ://pbs.twimg.com/media/GEqoWAFXQAAPRXm?format=jpg&name=...
| nescioquid wrote:
| If you're ever going to get the point where you recognize
| tactics (or anything, for that matter) on the board, how the
| pieces move must already be internalized and not require any
| thought. People even especially practice visualizing knight
| journeys between arbitrary squares to make this more automatic.
|
| If you ask an experienced player to use a weird piece set, you
| will only be introducing error and cognitive overhead. If you
| ask someone naive to the game to use the piece set, do they
| internalize how the pieces move more quickly and get over the
| impedance when they start to use a normal set?
|
| Going at a tangent to your idea, maybe it is possible to
| construct a set that aids the performance of a naive player,
| but which degrades the performance of a more experienced
| opponent. Could that handicap be as great as a club player
| offering pawn odds against a naive opponent?
| junon wrote:
| > has already internalized the mapping from piece shape to
| movement
|
| Magnus Carlson, considered one of - if not _the_ - best chess
| players of all time has a famous video of him playing three
| chess matches simultaneously, blindfolded, and winning all
| three.
|
| Once you get to a certain point not only the movements but also
| entire gameplay strategies become internalized.
| WJW wrote:
| Not to mention the video where the board is presented in the
| "wrong" direction, so he enumerates to himself which squares
| the pieces are on, _then closes his eyes so he can see the
| board clearer_.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Curious about the second tweet: are they typically called
| "liberties" in chess or is that borrowed from Go?
| mellosouls wrote:
| Its not a chess term.
| catapart wrote:
| That is very clever!
|
| But I hate the way the pawns face. Makes sense! But it still
| reads, to me, like one of those "color, but the text is in a
| different color" things. Feels like the pawns should be facing
| the opposite direction. =/
| phkahler wrote:
| It's attack direction not movement direction. Pawns are the one
| piece where there is a difference and I'm not sure which is
| better ;-)
| e12e wrote:
| Also, there's rochade/castling.
| Nition wrote:
| Catapart is aware, they're just saying it's unfortunate how
| it ends up looking.
| da_chicken wrote:
| It is very clever, except accidental rotation can easily turn
| rooks into bishops and vice-versa.
| e12e wrote:
| Sounds like a fun variant, allowing that as a move...
| (Remicent of shogi).
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Same. I understand why they're like that but I can't see it any
| other way than: _" Why are pawns going to move in the wrong
| direction?"_.
| joshka wrote:
| I think change out \/ for: # # #
|
| And the knight for: # # # #
| # # # #
|
| And you might have something a little nicer
| mxwsn wrote:
| What I enjoy about this design is it exploits the correlation
| between piece value with the number of ways it can move,
| resulting in a visual intuition that more visually complex pieces
| are worth more on average. The knight is perhaps the frustrating
| exceptions to this.
| neilk wrote:
| Piece value is determined by how many squares it can threaten.
|
| This is why rooks are worth 5 and bishops are worth 3, despite
| both having apparently equal freedom of movement (just rotated
| 45 degrees). The bishop will be able to access strictly fewer
| squares than the rook even in the best case, and usually much
| fewer. And the bishop is stuck on one color.
| HeWhoLurksLate wrote:
| At least at the level I play at, knights are invaluable because
| of their ability to jump over walls and threaten multiple
| pieces at the same time - they're the piece most likely to
| create a successful fork (threatening two pieces of value at
| the same time, likely forcing your opponent to pick which thing
| they're more willing to lose)
| freyfogle wrote:
| I suspect Josef Hartwig would like a word
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hartwig#Chess_sets
|
| https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus-Schachspiel
| tdiff wrote:
| And it looks so much more reasonable, I would say
| SamBam wrote:
| Except that this set describes the attack directions, not the
| motion directions. The difference is in the shape of the
| pawns. I think this one is quite interesting, as showing
| lines of threat.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| The pawns felt like they were going backwards. Maybe if
| they had wee arrow heads.
| tdiff wrote:
| Those peaces remain unreasonably expensive on Amazon, btw.
| brk wrote:
| Peace has always come at a high cost. But if it's available
| on Amazon that still seems like progress.
| loceng wrote:
| Peace is dead; long live peace.
| tdiff wrote:
| Won't fix the typo just so others could enjoy your joke
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| I have the 1924 Bauhaus chess set and it's the most beautiful
| thing I own.
|
| Always loved how the shape and size of the pieces indicate
| their moves while still being simple and recognisable.
| binrec wrote:
| cf. Bernard Parham's "Matrix Notation", which uses the same
| shapes for pawns, bishops, rooks, and (almost) queens:
| https://www.thechessdrum.net/talkingdrum/TheMatrix/index.htm...
| drojas wrote:
| Interesting, it seems like we can "dissect" each piece into
| independent properties like possible directions and possible
| distances. Then one could generate chess set spaces randomly and
| have a lot of fun.
| jerf wrote:
| https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-variants/all-30-piece...
|
| Not that that's an exclusive list either,
| morepork wrote:
| If made into a physical set, I could see the bishops and rooks
| getting confused
| zdragnar wrote:
| Maybe it's just the top down view, but the white king and queen
| are practically indistinguishable to me.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| I still have a set which was sold as "Visual Chess", and you can
| still find it on eBay for example. The pieces were mostly like
| traditional design (but kind of "modernized" in 1960s style) but
| when viewed from the top (i.e. as you play), there was an
| indication of the allowed move. You can see some examples in the
| image link below.
|
| Even the pawns had a nice design which clearly indicated that
| movement of one square forward (normally), or attacking on the
| diagonal, were both allowed.
|
| https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Yx4AAOSwTY9i7XeC/s-l960.jpg
|
| https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/AZUAAOSwuABi7XeE/s-l960.jpg
| schiffern wrote:
| Fantastic. Mirror:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240125205710/https://i.ebayimg...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240125205730/https://i.ebayimg...
| angry_moose wrote:
| I had an updated version of this set (probably from the 90s?).
| Mine had a better board and I think the tops of the pieces were
| different, but the text/diagrams were identical:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinteresting/comments/c1ri78/t...
|
| Not all of the moves were the clearest, but it was still handy
| while trying to learn.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| That's the exact set I had. Worked pretty great for learning
| the game.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| Art Deco chess pieces :o
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco
| punyearthling wrote:
| the rook and bishop are the same shapes tho
| DaveSchmindel wrote:
| Now do 3d chess!
| LeegleechN wrote:
| This idea is common in Shogi piece designs for those who can't
| read the traditional Kanji designs.
| notfed wrote:
| This would be awesome for teaching beginners.
|
| I'd probably go with circle for the king, and maybe an L or a
| sideways H for the knight, even though they break the original
| design rule. Otherwise K/Q/N just look too similar.
| excalibur wrote:
| +1 for making the knights an L. The way it is, the pawns sort
| of look like knights
| pwenzel wrote:
| Agreed. Love the concept, but the knights definitely need
| clarity.
| infogulch wrote:
| The L is an orthogonalist conspiracy theory. There's no right
| angles in the knight's movement, wake up sheeple!
|
| https://twitter.com/graycrawford/status/1750248031784763639
| emporas wrote:
| Knight's movement is a "G" "Gamma" not an L. Some day a
| brilliant game may pop up, which has several letters and try
| to match em together, like an L, a G, an I and so on.
| javier123454321 wrote:
| Learning the movement is by far the easiest part of teaching
| beginners. It's fine as a design exercise, but its effect in
| making it easier to learn is close to null.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Off topic, but does anyone know a browser extension that lets you
| block certain domains from the HN list? I've blocked twitter/x
| from my DNS, and don't want links to it cluttering the feed.
| nick_g wrote:
| I'm not aware of one, but if you can insert custom css rules it
| should be simple with something like tbody
| tr.athing:has(.title .titleline a[href*="twitter.com"]),
| tbody tr.athing:has(.title .titleline a[href*="twitter.com"]) +
| tr, tbody tr.athing:has(.title .titleline
| a[href\*="twitter.com"]) + tr + tr {
| display: none; }
|
| This selects for any `tr` which has an anchor to a url with
| twitter.com somewhere in it (with some layers in between) and
| the two `tr` which follow. Note that this is pretty naive and
| could have some false positives with links such as
| https://example.com/blog/a-post-about-twitter.com and such, you
| could be more careful with the attribute selector if you'd like
|
| This will leave "holes" in the numbering of the list of items
| as the numbers are not calculated based on the structure of the
| document but are rather hardcoded. You could definitely fix
| this with some more funky css rules if needed.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| Perfect thank you.
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| I would think you could automatically load the first match's
| "hide" URL until no more matches appear in the page, but it
| might trip some kind of rate limiter.
| timeon wrote:
| Pay/login-walled sites are common here.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| That is... not why I blocked it.
| autocorr wrote:
| Lichess also includes a piece set similar to this, although with
| the notable difference that the Knight is shaped like a greater-
| than symbol and the pawn is a small square.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| This is not a new idea.
| klysm wrote:
| Pawns are awkward though because movement doesn't align with
| attack
| trgn wrote:
| Yup, the visually dominating pieces end up _feeling_ wrong.
| It'd really bother me tbh.
| addisaden wrote:
| a theme for chess.com would be nice !!
|
| Lovely communicative design
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I like it, but the knights still aren't quite right. And I'd
| probably give all of them square bases, so that the bishop and
| rooks weren't so easily mistakable with just a 45deg turn.
| mattigames wrote:
| It's a good idea but looks a bit too bland for my taste, I think
| a bit more spiky would be better, so based on this I made such a
| concept:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/mXd0L3P.png (also blue-vs-red, to give it a
| bit of color)
|
| Non-colored version: https://i.imgur.com/A1Vofpz.png
| ortusdux wrote:
| It would be fun to make up a physical version with lasers and a
| fog machine.
| loceng wrote:
| Do you need fog if lasers aiming at the board?
| thih9 wrote:
| In the meantime there is Khet board game:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khet_(game) - fog machine not
| included.
| crdrost wrote:
| I think this is fun, but
|
| (a) knights' threats are disconnected and this "flower" approach
| while good is maybe not ideal. You might as well use a hollow
| circle at that point.
|
| (b) when we say "chess pieces can be redesigned to be..." then I
| think about actual physical pieces, it would not do to make these
| as actual physical pieces because an accidental misplacement
| turns a rook into a bishop or vice versa. Gotta make the bishop
| look like it is "sniping" along the diagonals while the rook
| looks more "sweeping" maybe?
|
| (c) don't make the king a little-queen. Make the king a little
| square to emphasize "it can only threaten the neighboring
| square," then it looks more visually distinctive.
|
| The pawns are fun though.
| cruano wrote:
| Unrelated, but I just realized the horse is not in fact called
| "horse" like it is in Italian/Spanish.
| jorisboris wrote:
| Or Dutch
| ambigious7777 wrote:
| When I was younger, I always believed that the proper name
| was for the knight was "horse" (my primary language is
| English). I only figured it out when I was playing chess
| against my friend, and he was like, "horse? wth is that"
| WJW wrote:
| It's been weird/amusing observing how different age groups at
| my local chess clubs call pieces and concepts. The older
| group very much stays to the local Dutch terminology for both
| while the younger group (presumably influenced by youtube)
| tends to mix Dutch piece names with English concepts. So you
| can have a koning (king) that is being "skewered" by a
| koningin (Queen) on the tweede (second) rank.
| jayknight wrote:
| >an accidental misplacement turns a rook into a bishop or vice
| versa
|
| This was my first thought too. If the "feet" of all of the
| pieces were "flat", or parallel to the rows of the board, you
| could more easily tell their proper orientation.
| ramon156 wrote:
| I also realized that if you defined the pieces like their
| moves, the knight's shape would be.... Interesting
| ikedeno wrote:
| I've wanted to see something like those scope beams, another idea
| is each square on the board could change colour by how many
| pieces can "see" it.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| I've been wanting the same exact thing! I think for beginners
| (and mediocre players like myself) it would help a lot to
| prevent blunders. Being able to visualize the squares attacked
| by the knight would be especially useful.
|
| I've thought about having the squares show light shades of
| primary colors so you could see which side is attacking a
| square, and the composite colors would highlight contested
| ones, darker shades would mean more attackers. Like
| red/blue/purple or yellow/red/orange.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Why? By the time you have understood the game, you know the
| pieces. There are only six of them, after all.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| This is cool! The major online chess sites should add this as an
| option.
|
| The lines don't need to be so thick I think, which would allow
| little arrow heads to make it even more obvious. And while we're
| at it, they don't even need to look like actual physical pieces,
| so the knight could be designed to show how it hops over squares
| by having blank spots in its icon.
| infogulch wrote:
| For me the most surprising observation from this thread is this
| tweet [1] showing that the knight's moves are exactly the squares
| that the queen can't get to within a 2 square manhattan distance.
|
| I.e. the knight is an anti-queen.
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/1750285122769957129
| aurelwu wrote:
| Some non-orthodox chess variants have a piece which combines
| Queen+Knight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(chess)
|
| very old variants often had such compound pieces like for
| example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Acedrex
| porphyra wrote:
| There's also the knook that combines the Knight and the Rook,
| which was hilariously invented as a meme on /r/anarchychess:
| https://anarchychess.fandom.com/wiki/Knook
| lovecg wrote:
| This is why in some rare endgames you might want to promote to
| a knight instead of a queen to avoid a stalemate!
| dheera wrote:
| In Chinese chess, the horse behaves like the knight in western
| chess except that (a) it cannot jump over pieces, and (b) the
| definition of jumping over is that it first move
| horizontally/vertically 1 step and then diagonally 1 step. It
| cannot first move diagonally.
|
| This also leads to situations where two knights can be
| positioned amongst other pieces such that one knight is able to
| capture the other but not vice versa.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Most people think of the knight move as one straight and then
| one diagonal. However, this is still ambiguous. Imagine one
| up, then one down left for example, resulting in the square
| left to the original square. A better description is moving 2
| squares straight, not diagonal, into one direction, then
| moving 1 square into a 90deg turned direction.
| blauditore wrote:
| I thought that was the main deal about knights...
| andoando wrote:
| To add to that, this also makes a knight and queen a very
| strong attacking combo, because they can uniquely cover the
| most squares.
| scottlilly wrote:
| Several years ago, I wrote a chess-like game where the shape of
| the pieces showed their potential moves
| (https://github.com/scottlilly/mogrichess). This was needed
| because the a capturing piece gained the movement abilities of
| the piece it could capture, so pieces' movement abilities were
| always changing.
|
| Unfortunately, I never got around to writing a good AI so you
| could play against the computer. At some point, I'd like to get
| back to that project.
| d-lisp wrote:
| In a sense, chess pieces can already perceived as geometric
| attack directions. After too much chess I feel frightened by the
| salt shaker.
| beefman wrote:
| This idea has been around a long time.
|
| Recognizing the pieces is the easiest part of chess. And distinct
| symbolic forms are actually easier than representational forms
| like these. Similarly, iconic phonetic notation not a good
| replacement for the Latin alphabet
|
| https://www.omniglot.com/writing/visiblespeech.htm
| purplejacket wrote:
| Nice :-) I might make the King round though. Set it apart more.
| beAbU wrote:
| Learning all the possible moves and attacks in chess is the least
| difficult part of learning chess.
| navane wrote:
| I had a similar idea: https://imgur.com/a/MccC29V
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