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Real Time Chess – A physical chess board without the concept of turns

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262 points dschuessler | 1 comments | 29 Mar 25 11:41 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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xg15 ◴[29 Mar 25 16:40 UTC] No.43516747[source]▶
> so this should be a pretty uncontroversial minor rules update

My kind of humor.

Always found it an interesting aspect of chess that the most "common sense" rules (Players take turns; no skipping; one move per turn) result in the most unintuitive outcomes and a massive increase in complexity: Suddenly you can reason about the pieces a player won't be able to move in a turn, you can double-bind players, you get draws where its provably impossible for any player to win, etc.

(In that sense, chess is a bit like the IntercalScript language earlier today: All features are superficially reasonable and in the service of simplicity, yet result in the weirdest outcomes)

Wouldn't all this be gone for chess without turns?

Or would strategies become even more intricate, e.g. taking into account the minimum time you'd require to physically move a piece?

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hossbeast ◴[31 Mar 25 18:49 UTC] No.43538353[source]▶
In addition to the per-piece cool downs, there should be a per-playet global cooldow of say 10 seconds
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1. xg15 ◴[31 Mar 25 19:14 UTC] No.43538647[source]▶
Maybe.

My first thought was that this would essentially devolve to speed chess, because any player who waited longer to move than their cooldown would put themself at a disadvantage.

But I think there is a strategic property that could make the game interesting, namely the "phase shift" between the players' turns: When the cooldowns are interleaved, the game becomes turn-based speed chess. But when the cooldowns sync up, you might get something Diplomacy-like, where both players have 10 seconds to guess the other's next move, then both will move almost simultaneously.

This shift will slowly change throughout the game and can even be changed intentionally if one player waits longer with their turn than they'd have to.