playstrategy.org

Weekly Challenge 83: Monster Value

@Jisu101 I think it is no different to any checkmate in Monster. White is automatically being given the win because there is a sequence that black cannot avoid for its King to be captured on the next turn

@woll I think that it is correct. Any move that black makes allows white to capture the King on the next turn (with two moves), but in the current position the black's King cannot be captured by white in two moves.
It might not be intuitive but it is correct.

I guess you can say that the situation is quite "monstrous" ;)

From a playability standpoint, it would be easier to force the player to capture the king :) The stalemate one requires a good bit of thinking :)

I would find it ok if players make mistakes on one of their two moves to not see the capture sequence, even though maybe it goes against the idea of “can’t avoid capture”.

Though that would probably also remove the possibility of any stalemates, since the king is allowed to move into positions where it can be captured.

So I guess it also depends on whether you want stalemate as a possibility, as well as just the technical preference/presentation of one win condition over another.

@shinuito I agree with your statements. There are definitely some pros to making the player execute the King capture. However, at the moment, this is not how Monster Chess is setup to work on PlayStrategy. We will review if we want to make this change to our Monster Chess implementation, but I can't say it is our top priority.

Reconnecting