Finished playtest #1 of Chess in Hell this morning by myself (chess brother folded and left me to it, can't blame him), and this is what I ended up with. The only thing omitted from view here is a neutral piece way over on b4.
It turns out the possible endings are lose, kill adversary, trap adversary, or... trap yourself. One may opt as a last resort to safely imprison oneself in Hell, out of reach of the Adversary. I'm not sure if this is done by simply resigning in this position or if you should be able to pass, which would be helpful in bad endings like this. To be clear, this is not a win.
The last thing the Adversary did here was take a pawn on g6. The sort-of-broken priority system for Adversary captures actually seemed to work nicely—I was both losing and able to predictably find this compromise. SLADDS also seems to work well enough, especially with only a queen movement pattern for the Adversary. The way it bounces off walls and obstacles tends to lead it to vulnerabilities and exactly the square where you didn't want it to go. Anyway, it definitely needs a smart if/else routine worked out.
This ending was pretty cool. I was in our losing middlegame, trying to defend myself and start making a safe place to either resign or plan a counterattack, but I slipped up and lost a critical bishop. This resulted in two undefended pieces, and it was clear that things would rapidly fall apart, so I made a dire choice and sacrificed my only queen as a distraction. This gave me a moment to rearrange my remaining pieces into a forestalling sacrifice arrangement where I could expect certain ones to be taken first. And in the end, I had time to move the survivors back to defend each other with the kings in the corner, behind some pawns and neutral pieces. This was pretty ugly, and taking my own pieces ended up being very useful as well.
The Kings both castled together like this are able defend the pawns/pieces in front of them, and I kind of worry that this is an easy out. But getting one king across the board in the first place might be a risky or costly opportunity. In the end, if you're spending a lot of time desperately hiding your kings in one corner, you've probably lost.
It remains to be seen how this would go if you and the other player did a good job planning ahead. Maybe this game is easy. Who knows! I will have to wait and find out another time.
General notes
Forgot to mention last time that we noticed the standard starting position is just not very helpful here. I'm not sure if this means we should change it to a smarter layout or if it's a nice joke about the foolishness of these armies.
Keeping in mind the turn order is very important, as there are moves in chess where you can expect some kind of repetition if it doesn't work out, but here you'll move a piece and not immediately be able to move it back to safety if the Adversary makes a threat on it.
If one player dies, according to the rules from the last post (linked at top) it may suddenly become pretty easy to checkmate the Adversary via two normal attacks from one color, thus a good strategy would be to simply sacrifice one side. Some better options for player checkmate results:
- Either player checkmated = we lose
- The previously described Hell's Army mode, where a third player, a computer player, or some kinda genius paper AI converts and plays captured pieces for the Adversary
- Two checkmates = loss; Remove the whole petrification thing and instead the checkmated player simply plays on.
- Or... maybe this is when the Ad gains additional movement patterns? After gobbling up a king. That's pretty evil.