No-castle variant

[Dave Neve]

Hello

I'd like to play a "no-castle" variant but starting from the standard position in chess.
But when I choose the "no-castle" variant, it seems to be "shuffle".
What it the variant that is "no-castle" starting from a normal chess position please?

Thanks

[H.G.Muller]

'nocastle' is a variant playable on chessclub.com, and there it is indeed a shuffle variant that doesn not respect Rook or King location. The local version mimics that. In principle you can select the start position of shuffle variants from the New Shuffle Game menu dialog, but you would have to know the number of the FIDE position for that.

Now 'nocastle' (like many ICS 'variants') is not really a variant, it is just normal Chess starting from a non-standard positition. The reason it was originally implemented in WinBoard as a separate variant was that WinBoard in the old days did not keep track of castling rights even in normal Chess. So the only way to make it reject castling as an illegal move was to define a new variant where castling was never possible.

For what you want you could simply play normal Chess, but first paste a position without castling rights as a FEN, and start playing from there:

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR w - - 0 1

[Dave Neve]

Hello HG Muller
Thanks for all that.
I've tried out your idea and is seems to half work.
After setting the variant and loading the classic start position, WinChess puts me in edit game mode.
if I go to Mode, "machine black" and then make a move with white, the clock does not start running down for black and there's no game being played in fact
if however, I tell Mode "machine white", that seems to work. The machine starts off and then I can move and the game continues as normal.
is there a way around this?
Thanks

[H.G.Muller]

You should have gotten an error message (on the line above the board) when you tried Machine Black before moving, as at that time it was still white's move. You can only do Machine Black while it is black's turn. So when you want to play with white you should first move, and then hit Machine Black.

[Dave Neve]

Thanks, that did the trick
SafeTex