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.
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:
Great! This will be excellent for beginners. I'm considering teaching chess to my kids. Can I still find it online? My searches on Amazon and Google haven't yielded the results I need.
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.
You mean a 2-square Chebyshev distance, I think (the Linf norm). A 2-square Manhattan distance (the L1 norm) wouldn't include any of the squares that a knight can get to.
For those that want a visual description there's a blog I serendipitous recently ran into[0]. If you're too lazy to open:
- n-square Chebyshev distance forms concentric squares around your starting point
- n-square Manhattan Distance forms diamonds (meaning up/down/left/right = 1 space away but all diagonals are 2 spaces away)
We could also say the Knight can go everywhere a queen can't in the 3-square Manhattan distance and this might be more useful since it is all points along that boundary except the corners! (We got an in the wild "2 problems in computer science" with an "off by 1" error :)
Chess would be a more elegant game without the stalemate rule.
(And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot.
So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves, it loses in attacking spirit.)
I dont get it. Queen can do everything a knight can, and then some. How can electing a knight instead of queen can be of any usefulness?
Or do you mean it avoids stalemate by making it harder for the elector to defend/attack, and loose? I dont see any advantage there, isnt stalemate always preffered to loosing?
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.
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 90° turned direction.
I'm not a master or anything, but I've always found it interesting that the queen is usually thought of as the most powerful piece while I think it's the knight.
Yeah the queen can move everywhere, but she's "predictable". The way a knight moves makes it more difficult to defend against IMO.
A huge difference is that a queen, like a rook, can attack a whole row and column, making it possible to box in an opponent's king. A knight has limited reach and can never attack a square the same colour as the one it is occupying.
Another is that a queen, like a rook, can reach any unblocked square in at most two moves. A Knight can require up to six moves!
Add to this the ability to move and attack diagonally like a bishop, but without the restriction of staying on the same colour of squares...
Knights tend to be overrated at lower levels of playing strength, where their irregular moving pattern is indeed challenging for the players, and as a result, Knight moves often get overlooked.
However, once a player becomes more proficient, not only the obvious superiority of the Queen, but even of the Bishop (other things being equal, Bishops are thought to be actually somewhat more valuable, especially as a pair) starts becoming apparent.
Knights are objectively nowhere near as powerful as queens. However they're underrated in blitz chess, where their visually hard to see moves often catch people unaware.
Even grandmasters fall for knight forks in blitz games quite often.
Knights are prone to getting "trapped". There are limited places a knight can go, so the opponent only has to maintain pressure on those squares. This is the reason why it's generally a bad idea to put a knight near a corner of the board.
(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.
I think I'd be inclined to disambiguate them by making the ends of the bishop pointed and the ends of the rook blunt. When moving along a diagonal you're moving in the direction of square corners, vs faces for moving in ranks and files, so it makes sense in that way, and it also evokes the shapes of the classical pieces.
>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.
It would need 8 arms, not 4. (A well-placed Knight meaningfully controlling all of its 8 target squares is actually referred to as an "octopus Knight" sometimes).
It is also opinionated, in the sense that the vectors for Knight moves is [2, 1] and [1, 2] (whereby in both cases negative numbers can be used)... so whether you visualize a Knight move towards the left top corner as an L (x-1 first, then y-2), or as an ꓶ (y-2 first, then x-1) is an arbitrary decision.
It might be my OCD side coming out, but any design prioritizing one of these perspectives over the equally valid alternative doesn't feel "clean" to me somehow : )
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.
It is called "Springer" (translates to: jumper) in German. Sometimes "Pferd" or "Ross" is also used (translates to: horse and steed, resp.). That's why "Knight's tour" is called "Springerproblem" or "Rösselsprung" (from "Ross") in German.
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"
I have a fair amount of experience teaching children and adults how to play chess.
I've almost never seen a beginner mess up the basics of how the pieces move(what this piece set displays). Probably 95% of confusion about rules in new players is about the things you mention. Especially en passant and castling rules.
The rule on castling through check is especially confusing, and I've seen even master strength players believe that you can't castle long if b1 or b8 is attacked. Another common mistake is forgetting the rook or king has previously moved.
En passant is also very confusing for beginners because there's no indication of it being possible in the current board state. It depends on the previous ply.
Repetition is also a major footgun in tournament play. It's often referred to as repetition of moves, but it's actually repetition of the position(which is typically reached via repetition of moves, but doesn't have to). And there's a very specific procedure in tournament chess for claiming a repetition. You have to write down your move, stop the clock and call the arbiter without making the move. If you make the move and hit the clock, now your opponent has every right to make another move, creating a new position. The repetition no longer counts when that happens(so you can't claim e.g oh the position repeated a 3rd time 15 moves ago, gimme a draw).
I actually lost a game this way when I had a repetition in a losing position.
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. =/
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.
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?
Exactly this. Relatives have been trying to choose "fancy-looking" chess sets for me as a gift, and I always hated them. I don't want fancy pieces, I want the standard ones that don't give me cognitive overhead :-).
"Tournament chessboards" are my favourites, obviously.
>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?
> 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.
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.
The more impressive one is where he's matched up against 10 Harvard Law students simultaneously, and is blindfolded. He won all of the games handily.
Even more impressive, one of the students asked Magnus if he could sign a chess board. Not only did Magnus sign an autograph, he literally annotated the entire game from memory. That is insane to me.
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.
Readit News
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
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.
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https://web.archive.org/web/20240125205710/https://i.ebayimg...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240125205730/https://i.ebayimg...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_Deco
I.e. the knight is an anti-queen.
[1]: https://twitter.com/skidbladnirr_/status/1750285122769957129
very old variants often had such compound pieces like for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Acedrex
- n-square Chebyshev distance forms concentric squares around your starting point
- n-square Manhattan Distance forms diamonds (meaning up/down/left/right = 1 space away but all diagonals are 2 spaces away)
We could also say the Knight can go everywhere a queen can't in the 3-square Manhattan distance and this might be more useful since it is all points along that boundary except the corners! (We got an in the wild "2 problems in computer science" with an "off by 1" error :)
[0] https://chris3606.github.io/GoRogue/articles/grid_components...
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(And apparently it would be a more _interesting_ game without castling. At least according to the game that the AIs at Deep Mind played when they trained them on this variant on a whim. Castling was supposed to speed up development of chess, but it favours the defense a lot.
So what the game's appeal wins from castling in cutting out some busy work moves, it loses in attacking spirit.)
Or do you mean it avoids stalemate by making it harder for the elector to defend/attack, and loose? I dont see any advantage there, isnt stalemate always preffered to loosing?
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.
"the knight may move to any nearest cell not on an orthogonal or diagonal line on which it stands"
Knights have odd-even parity, i.e., they attack only opposite colored squares.
Pop quiz: How many knights can you place on a board so that they don't attack each other?
Yeah the queen can move everywhere, but she's "predictable". The way a knight moves makes it more difficult to defend against IMO.
Another is that a queen, like a rook, can reach any unblocked square in at most two moves. A Knight can require up to six moves!
Add to this the ability to move and attack diagonally like a bishop, but without the restriction of staying on the same colour of squares...
The queen is immensely powerful.
However, once a player becomes more proficient, not only the obvious superiority of the Queen, but even of the Bishop (other things being equal, Bishops are thought to be actually somewhat more valuable, especially as a pair) starts becoming apparent.
Even grandmasters fall for knight forks in blitz games quite often.
The complement-queen I would say
"The knight may move to one of the squares nearest to that on which it stands but not on the same rank, file or diagonal."
[1] https://www.fide.com/FIDE/handbook/LawsOfChess.pdf
(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.
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.
I guess there is still a cultural aversion to its use, however.
It is also opinionated, in the sense that the vectors for Knight moves is [2, 1] and [1, 2] (whereby in both cases negative numbers can be used)... so whether you visualize a Knight move towards the left top corner as an L (x-1 first, then y-2), or as an ꓶ (y-2 first, then x-1) is an arbitrary decision.
It might be my OCD side coming out, but any design prioritizing one of these perspectives over the equally valid alternative doesn't feel "clean" to me somehow : )
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This design doesn't account for many special qualities and behaviors pieces exhibit. It doesn't indicate that
* while pawns do capture diagonally (forward), they are pushed forward in straight line
* they can capture en passant
* they can move by 2 squares from their initial file, and only from the initial file
* they can be promoted to another piece
* Knight moves are not inhibited by the presence of other pieces (unlike any other piece, a Knight can "jump over" pieces)
* castling
* special status of the King (unless it's conveyed by that circle in the middle, but it's not nearly as readable a symbol as a crown)
So this design kind of works if you already have complete information from elsewhere, but isn't that great if it were your first source of info.
It also loses the poetic aesthetics of the traditional pieces, with queens and kings and bishops etc.
I've almost never seen a beginner mess up the basics of how the pieces move(what this piece set displays). Probably 95% of confusion about rules in new players is about the things you mention. Especially en passant and castling rules.
The rule on castling through check is especially confusing, and I've seen even master strength players believe that you can't castle long if b1 or b8 is attacked. Another common mistake is forgetting the rook or king has previously moved.
En passant is also very confusing for beginners because there's no indication of it being possible in the current board state. It depends on the previous ply.
Repetition is also a major footgun in tournament play. It's often referred to as repetition of moves, but it's actually repetition of the position(which is typically reached via repetition of moves, but doesn't have to). And there's a very specific procedure in tournament chess for claiming a repetition. You have to write down your move, stop the clock and call the arbiter without making the move. If you make the move and hit the clock, now your opponent has every right to make another move, creating a new position. The repetition no longer counts when that happens(so you can't claim e.g oh the position repeated a 3rd time 15 moves ago, gimme a draw).
I actually lost a game this way when I had a repetition in a losing position.
Obviously I meant a rank (horizontal), not a file (vertical), sorry. Cannot edit the comment anymore
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. =/
So pawns would be
which looks less anti-directional.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.
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?
"Tournament chessboards" are my favourites, obviously.
Blindfolded chess for the better player ;)
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.
Even more impressive, one of the students asked Magnus if he could sign a chess board. Not only did Magnus sign an autograph, he literally annotated the entire game from memory. That is insane to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Rr4Uq1R-I
Knight's profile is the L-shape.
Rook has four parapets (and four gaps).
Bishop has a diagonal slit.
King has 8 stubby protrusions in his crown.
Queen has 8 pointy protrusions in her crown.
Pawns are most basic (ironic considering their qualities are most byzantine). I guess it's nice to have a baseline piece for aesthetics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hartwig#Chess_sets
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus-Schachspiel
Always loved how the shape and size of the pieces indicate their moves while still being simple and recognisable.
<https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF1392.jpeg> <https://www.lijf.org/chess/DSCF2887.jpeg>
https://www.haiku-os.org/development/icon-guidelines/
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