I am going to make a version of chess where the players can't kill each others' pieces ever, and the pawns turn into the other player's pieces when they get to the other side, and walk backwards (having changed colour).

If anyone has any spare code or knows links that can help me do this in java with minimal fuss, I'd be heavily obliged and will give you credits in the software for whatever extent of help you give. I'd rather get some help because if I'm left to do this alone I will no doubt make a pretty warped version.

Still, it'll be an interesting new perspective.

What I'll have to do is to actually create the entire chess software from scratch in java, in the most laborious and probably outlandish way possible - and only learn years later what the correct way of constructing it is.

[I reckon I'll have to just create rules for each type of piece's moves, primarily, and that's it - so not a very difficult database to make to power it]

LearningNewb... if you want to play a game of nonviolent pacifist chess with me, I'm at chess.com, we can play a "non-rated" game and have a gentlemen's agreement not to kill each others' pieces at all, not even the Queen or the pawns (and since we can't make the pawns move the other way, we can agree to change them to knights who all sit there and do nothing, chivalrously). I reckon it could take 100s of moves, but someone would get a checkmate. There is no skill level in chess - it is just a reflection of human maturity and intelligence... the rules are the same for everyone!

Anyway, I'm going to try this particular nonviolent pacifist chess method with someone else too, I'll let you know how long it takes to get a checkmate.

I wonder if nonviolent chess will catch on in anti-war circles? It could have a lot of fans...

(ps I'm signing up to forums.sun.com to see if I can get a good spread of sensible help and stop myself building some warped versions.)

Do the opponents merely shake hands and the losing piece knits from the penalty box?

Can you adapt any existing open source code? Save yourself some work. I just discovered Chess Titans on my pc and I have been hitting the "back" button a lot lol. Great app, have you seen Love chess?

Post the url to the finished warez please.

Sorry to not contribute to what you are asking for, but won't that royally ruin the strategic factor of chess? Game metrics will go haywire?

For a full explanation of why tactically nonviolence chess is likely to lead to much better, richer games than ordinary chess, read this snippet from a forum post i made on chess.com...

If it works out, we can name it Chivalry Chess! I came up with the idea when i started to try protecting my queen much more when playing and stopped seeing it as the chief piece of aggression, always sacrificing it in the name of annihilating the enemy defences completely. Once I started to do that I ended up focusing much more on little strategic methodologies, like planning out little teams to do different tasks, one main one to do most of the heavy defending and two small ones attacking partly and also defending the outer area of defences, so that my king and queen end up much better protected.


With non-death/non-violent/pacifist/chivalry chess, of course, it's all or nothing - you can't just play chess where you make your own rule not to kill the enemy pieces. A pawn reaching the end of the board... there's only one thing it can do (bite your posterior), and those ever-advancing aggressor queens that come your way and sometimes don't watch where they're going...


Still, it is possible to make much better use of pieces of your own by aiming to keep them all alive and aside from when vital defence work has to be done, and occasionally when an aggressive strike can end the whole war, in moments... I'm only a handful of games into this new way of playing chess (in the past I was quite an aggressive player, frenzied one might say).

There are upgrades to my rules - firstly you can't get a pawn to the other side - it's impossible - the enemy pawn will always block it.

Other than that it's the same actually. I still haven't tried it. Yeah, I know tweaking existent code would be easier, and I'll aim for that, one day. Right now I've retired from life and won't start any programming until I've had a good long break from technology.

Still, with nothing to do in my life other than accumulate dosh it leaves me free to do a lot of travelling. However, one must be tight with the bucks. In these times there's so many many many people who will want to leech it. We are living at the end of the (western economic hegemony) world.

What I love most is how many people I've known who stacked up their dosh through disregarding things like their soul, through often being brutish, aggressive, deceptive and cunning. And they mostly all scorned me for being poor (and I ain't lying when I say I have had offers of 100k a year from the criminal underworld which I turned down because i wanna be the right guy to marry ANY woman i love, and i'm hoping that i stick to loving incredibly decent and nice women who do good things for the world, rather than evil manipulative saleswomen). And now, 7 to 10 years of honest hard work have come to fruition! How can they continue to pretend that lying, kissing bottom and generally exploiting planet earth and ALL HER CHILDREN is a way to make money which won't eventually just collapse in on itself. Bad things always end badly. That's the way (and good things end well - even if you have to traverse a landscape of pain and fear first).

After reading that it does seem interesting, but very challenging. I would be very interested in playing the game.

What was the purpose of your last paragraph?

What was the purpose of your last paragraph?

A fair question. The purpose is to promote pacifism and transparency by demonstrating that people who use aggression and deceit invariably fail at some stage in the cycles of life!

Perhaps I should have told you the one about my mate the peacelover, who's had a really tranquil and noble life, he's old now, but he's got a young daughter, he lived his life peacefully, he was always pushed aside, when i met him he was already "old" (to us techie children about 45 is old, so... he MUST be old) and his life has turned out really well. He's happy, he's going to go to "the other world" without having failed, without having been downtrodden by poverty or exclusion - even if he may have started like that, coming, as some of us do, from backgrounds which, more so in his day than mine, just aren't "acceptable" in "some parts of the world".

Or the other mate who's done pretty well for himself - despite losing his father when he was a kid, and indeed finding himself on the wrong side of a prison for perhaps something like a decade... he came back and made something of himself and has done amazingly and the one wish he'd wanted all his life, his only prayer, got answered not so long ago - his son- the little boy who then inspired ME - to accept the good things in life: love, marriage, children - and to put behind me a past of joking, smoking, midnight toking and getting my lovin on the run. That little boy really inspires me - he's so much fun, and he sings and dances, and he has an amazing cackle laugh he comes out with, he picked it up from his father. When i met that little boy, I wanted to have a son too. I helped build part of his bedroom, with my own two hands. I wanted to give something, because the gift I got from just meeting him was very big.

Just examples. Examples of what your life choices lead to. You can choose this path, you can choose that path. There's always so many, but usually we're just blind to all but one, and usually that one isn't even our path!