Tobo Mouse!

kaviiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii awww! I'm really hoping to playtest it next week if i can set up a simple digital board

Fascinating! This was brought up by one of the playtesters this morning; I think the similarities are interesting but largely superficial. While both games feature three players and a chesslike origin, the gameplay, point of the game, and scale are I think thoroughly different.

ty hy it means a lot

thanks for the comment!

If viewed strictly as a game to be solved, I believe it is possible that there is some optimal structure of moves for black and white to make such that red has no chance. However, this is limited by several factors:

• One must take care not to checkmate Red in the process; if while you are removing Red's pieces, they can manuever their own king into a checkmate by a non-king piece, Red wins the game. This is different from normal chess, where two players would always defeat an isolated third.
• While there is nothing in the rules that prevents white and black from communicating or collaborating, they often do not, or do not share the same strategy, especially from move 1 (and once pieces are moved, pre-planned strategies are out the window). That there are humans playing each of these sides (and not in fact one human playing both black and white) affects the game dramatically, in practice.
• A winning strategy for Black is set forth in the rules; the same is true for Red.

You could play it other ways, but I would play white->red->black, and follow that pattern til the end of the game. Perhaps this would be a good amendment to the rules.

Yes! So far I've found that "follow the other rules of chess" covers that, though it's definitely something to make clear in a longerform of rules (after all, pawns can't ever make it to the "8th" rank, so one could assume otherwise). However, despite it only taking three moves to do so, so far it seems like it'll happen surprisingly rarely - about as often in original chess.

If it helps, the board we've been using to play has a further indication to make it easier to tell which direction the pawns move: https://staging.cohostcdn.org/attachment/32877c61-ebd2-4de3-902e-29399f3e45f5/yurichess%20B.png?dpr=1.4634146341463414&width=628&height=628&fit=cover. In case orthogonal and diagonal are unclear; at any point, the pawn may move "forward" along the long edge of the square, or capture along either of the two forward corners. The way this works out, two of black's pawns move along one axis (the left two pawns towards the upper left edge of the board), whereas the other two pawns move on an axis 90 degrees different (the right two pawns towards the upper right edge of the board).

I've never seen game writing in github before! Then again, I don't use github in my day-to-day. There's quite a few things I'd change in your writing of the rules; let the kings capture kings and a great deal is simplified. Black does not need to force a win, and in fact wins by consent most commonly. in Object* the colors as listed should be Black, Red, then White, if you are listing white at all (the original rules intentionally do not, but I can see why you would if you are mathematizing the whole process to remove any poetry from it.) I do think the poetry of the game is essential to its gameplay, but I'll do my best in the next iteration of the game to spell out the idiosyncrasies you've encountered in your writ; stalemate (in the form of no moves that would not lead to check or checkmate) should be ignored and played through, likely leading to the capture of the king or checkmate and a potential end of the game; stalemate in the form of no moves available whatsoever to a single player should skip that player's turn; stalemate in the form of no player able to complete a move, or in the form of threefold repetition, should be a draw.

That sentence goes so hard I’m on board with the shirt

I think in most scenarios, the answer here is for red to not escape the checkmate but lean into it. However, we can't just say "you can ignore checks and then just let your king be taken", as victory for red can come with their own king being checkmated in particular. So, if the white and red kings are adjacent and literally no other pieces are checking the king and no moves are available (perhaps in a case of pseudo-epaulette mate?), the red king could be forced to take the white king.

Following the rules from there, I think we should adjudicate the result: either red still needs to pursue their own victory condition - placing either the red or black king under traditional checkmate (a red victory), failing which the game ends in a draw (for instance if all the pieces have been removed from the board save one king), or simply say that in this case the game is a draw. I'm tempted to say that if red king captures white or black king the game draws, and if white or black kings capture the red king the game proceeds (see your comments above, where this presents a handicap for red but not an elimination.)

The other option I see in the event of red capturing the white king is — if all players agree — to turn the lights out in the room. Success at this maneuver may see that red king is black now, and therefore victory for their side (perhaps all sides) has been conveniently achieved; similar creative solutions may occur to players encountering this uncommon situation in actual play.