An idea for this variant would be to display the board as 24x8, and make it possible to move a piece from any one of its three representations.
That could help to visualize moves for long range pieces such as bishops and queens. But I guess for knights as well.
Well.. you display a regular board, 8x8. The whole point of this variant that makes it fun (and very hard) is to keep the virtual cylinder in one's mind. That's how it's played OTB.
I am not a programmer, but I can imagine that scripting would be tricky, since you have to allow pieces to move freely from one side of the board to the other. But I hope there is a programmer out there up to the challenge :)
> The whole point of this variant that makes it fun (and very hard) is to keep the virtual cylinder in one's mind. That's how it's played OTB.
I'm not sure that is really the point of the variant. It's played OTB because it would be hard to do otherwise. With a computer, it'd be relatively easy to play on a 24x8 to help visualization.
Visualization is an important skill in chess, but it's not the whole point, otherwise we would play all games blindfolded.
Having a 24x8 board would help visualizing diagonal and knight ranges, without changing anything to the game rules.
think of Neo from the Matrix; the metro scene
he runs to the dark tunnel at the right side, gets out of the left enterance XD