Game Reviews by PeterAronson
Actually, this ought to be Excellent to the Nth Power! I am glad to see this game on a prominent page of its own, for while it's been on this site for years, you had to know where to find it, and as a Chess variant designer this (and the associated work that Ralph did to support it) has been one of the games that has influenced me the most. Bravo!
This looks amusing. It does seem that the scoring system encourages the other players to turn on the first player significantly damaged like starving wolves, lest they be left without any pieces of the eliminated player when it comes time to score. Not a game to play with someone who takes attacks personally! An omnidirectional Pawn is actually mWcF -- mFcW is an omnidirectional Berolina Pawn. This page might benefit from an ASCII diagram to backup the Javascript -- I first looked at it with Javascript turned off and was puzzled.
This is interesting (although I'd like to have seen it better developed and more completely written up), but what about the Knights -- which way do they capture?
A minor question -- if a Crane has not moved, but pecks at a piece from its starting place, can it still castle? Also, when castling long, would a piece at b2/8 still block castling?
It'd probably be too powerful, but it might have been amusing to have made the Dragon a Nightrider too, making it a Rocket-rider or Squirrel-rider. With the current definition I would think it would be rather weak in the endgame.
The only thing I have reservations about is the sidewise move of the Pawns. Generally, the forward-only move of Pawns encourages attack and provides some of a Chess-like game's dynamics. I wonder if adding a river line past which Pawns move sideways might not be a bad idea after all.
As for a name, if you were to run CHess, shOgi and xiangQI together, you'd get . . .Choqi . . . (I wonder of Cho means anything in any dialect of Chinese?)
One question: is a Yahoo allowed to move back to its starting square when the arrows allow for it, making a null move?
A comment about the 'Korean' Clodhopper -- following the analogy with the Korean Cannon, they should not be allowed to capture other Clodhoppers.
About the exit moves. I can see very easily how you ended up with them, and I for one like the forced exit rule, since it should make the game more decisive. An alternate approach if you did want to forbid them the tower in the first place would be to shade the arrows pointing into the tower, and add a rule that Ninnys and Yahoos may not follow a shaded arrow on their side of the board.
The War Tower has a slight resemblence to the Mad Elephent in Mad Elephant Chess.
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