lichess-org/scalachess

Are new Variants accepted if I send a PR?

theovoss opened this issue · 2 comments

I like lichess, been playing the app for a couple months and just realized the whole thing is open source. I have an idea for a chess variant I like to call Mimic. I'm a developer, but I haven't done scala yet (it's on my list of things to try). I'd be happy to write up a PR for the below, and wanted to first check and see if this idea at least has a chance of getting merged into the project before I dig in and figure out the implementation.

The rule concepts I have could go one of a two ways, with a potential configuration option.

*After perusing wikipedia to brush up on my known chess variants, the closest I see is Plunder Chess
*If my proposed Mimic variant isn't interesting enough to warrant building in, is there a different known variant you'd want? I'd still like to play around with this project a bit, and I think variants would be fun.

Possible Ruleset A: (simplest)

When a pawn captures, it turns into the piece that it captured. No more En passant but you get another back row piece. (this becomes much more interesting if it applies to all pieces -- see third configurable option)

Possible Ruleset B: (stacking)

When a pawn captures, it adds the movement attributes of the piece it captured to its own.
Movement properties stack.
So if a pawn captures a knight and then a queen, it would be able to do the knight movements, queen movements, and pawn movements, but the attribute of hopping from the knight wouldn't stack onto the queen style movements.
If a pawn captures a bishop, it could still move forward and En passant (pawn movements), as well as move diagonally (bishop movements)

Possible Ruleset: (configureable - built off A or B)

Either of the above rulesets, but allow players to configure which pieces it applies to ie: queens and knights, or pawns and king, or any combination or all pieces

A

If the simplest ruleset was used (A), then a queen capturing a pawn would become a pawn. If pawns weren't configured, it'd be stuck as a pawn.

B

If the stacking ruleset was used (B), then a queen capturing a knight would still be a queen, but also have the movement of a knight.

possible issues

if doing B, there's the issue of how to change the display to the user to show how any given piece can move. Currently thinking showing multiple pieces on a single square, but then would have to scale down the size of the image.

No, sorry

yagu0 commented

@theovoss : What you described sounds like a mix between Cannibal and Absorption Chess ( which you can play here https://vchess.club/#/variants/Cannibal and there https://vchess.club/#/variants/Absorption )

More generally, you can suggest variants on the Discord server https://discord.gg/a9ZFKBe