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Eurasian Chess. Synthesis of European and Asian forms of Chess. (10x10, Cells: 100) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Jul 9, 2017 09:23 AM UTC:

When I first made the Interactive diagram for this variant, I somehow overlooked the rules for King confinement and King facing. I now corrected that, so that the diagram indicates the proper King moves.

The confinement was easy to do: the diagram already supported a mechanism for this, by allowing the user to add a a small JavaScript function BadZone(file, rank, pieceType, color), which returns a non-zero value ('true') if a piece of the mentioned type and color is not allowed to move to the mentioned square. In absence of such a user-defined function, the diagram supposes that all pieces can go anywhere. This feature was needed to handle Xiangqi properly.

The non-facing rule was more troublesome, though. In the Xiangqi diagram I had implemented it by a trick, giving the Kings an extra move like a kind of lame 'Ski-Rook', which could not go to the first two squares, but could be blocked there, and relaxing the confinement rule for Kings to allow King capture anywhere. In combination with confinement to the Palace, this would prevent the King could capture anything other than a King with these move.

For Eurasian Chess this trick did not work, because the Kings can approach each other more closely than the number of ranks they are confined to. So any move allowing the Kings to capture each other could also be made entirely in the confinement zone, for capturing other pieces than Kings (which can go there). And for distant moves this should of course not be possible.

To solve this I made an ad-hoc extension of the Betza notation used by the interactive diagram: the modifier 'k' (which so far was not used) indicates the described move can only be used for capture of Kings (or, in general, royals). This makes it possible to describe the move of the King in Eurasian Chess as KkRkB, and that of Xiangqi as WkR.