[ List Latest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]
Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
I consider my Ajax army to be 'simple' in nature.
Just add the moves required to give pieces a Courier Man (Commoner) reach, and you get very interesting 'new traditional' pieces.
These extra 'adopted' moves are non-capturing to not upset some of the tactics (i.e. pins) we are used to and to allow the King a fair chance to defend itself against minor pieces in endgames.
The Ajax Chess complex includes: Ajax Chess (10x10), Ajax Random Chess (8x8), Ajax Modern Random Chess (9x9) and Ajax-Capablanca Chess (10x8)
Just add the moves required to give pieces a Courier Man (Commoner) reach, and you get very interesting 'new traditional' pieces.
These extra 'adopted' moves are non-capturing to not upset some of the tactics (i.e. pins) we are used to and to allow the King a fair chance to defend itself against minor pieces in endgames.
The Ajax Chess complex includes: Ajax Chess (10x10), Ajax Random Chess (8x8), Ajax Modern Random Chess (9x9) and Ajax-Capablanca Chess (10x8)
Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Oct 12, 2009 03:45 AM UTC:Recently, in another thread, Sam Trenholme made the statements found below.
He argues one side of the question very well, saying all the new simple
pieces are used up, and only complicated pieces are left.
How do you define a 'simple piece', anyhow? Hasn't anything in the last
2 years, say, counted as a simple piece?
2009-10-09 Sam Trenholme Verified as Sam Trenholme
'What I see ... is that all of the simple pieces a Chess-like game can
have are already invented, and that we’re having to come up with some
pretty convoluted moves to come up with new piece types.
The simple Chess pieces seem to be:
* Simple leapers (Such as the knight and the king) I wrote, a couple
of years ago, an essay describing 31 such leapers
* Simple sliders, such as rooks, bishops, and queens. There are ... 16
symmetrical sliders that can traverse the entire board if the board is a
bounded square; there is also the bishop and Shogi’s lance
It’s possible, of course, to combine leapers and sliders (Can you say
“Capablanca Chess�), but the only combined leapers + sliders in a
national game are Shogi’s promoted rooks and bishops. There are also
“ridersâ€, sliders whose 1-move “atom†is not to an adjacent square;
the knightrider is the most famous piece of this type.
Once we move past these simple pieces, things get complicated and the
learning curve goes up. One relatively simple piece is a piece that
captures differently than it moves; a piece that, say, moves like a knight
or captures like a bishop.
Betza covered the “crooked rookâ€, “crooked bishopâ€, and
“roseâ€â€”sliders which change their direction every square they slide.
Chinese Chess, of course, has the “Cannonâ€, which has inspired all
kinds of pieces that leap before moving or capturing (or a combination
thereof). Speaking of leaping pieces, I’m surprised no one has recently
discussed having a checker’s king in Chess: A piece that moves like a
Ferz, but captures by jumping over an adjacent piece, and can (optionally)
capture multiple times in its move. We can, of course, have a wazir
(horizontal and vertical) form of this piece, or combine it with any other
chess piece.
So, yeah, it looks like pretty much any kind of piece chess can have with
a simple move has been discussed here, so we’re moving on to complicated
pieces that don’t seem very intuitive to me.'3 comments displayed
Permalink to the exact comments currently displayed.
This is a question that is, by nature, a subjective impression. One person’s simple is another person’s complicated.
OK, let me try to prove myself wrong. I think one simple type of piece is a piece occasionally seen in historical Chess variants:
- The “hook mover” in Dai-Dai Shogi (and some of the other really huge Shogi variants) There are two versions of this hook mover; one that moves like a rook, then can, at any point, bend 90 degrees and continue its movement; the piece can go to any square on an empty board. There is also the “bishop” form of the hook mover that can go to any square of its color on an empty board.
- The “griffion” in Grande Acedrex. This piece moves out one square diagonally, then turns 45 degrees and moves any number of squares like a rook. A picture is worth a thousand words:
('#' is the piece, and it can move to any square marked 'X', '-', or '|'; the lines are used to show the piece moves like rook in these directions)
So, based on these two pieces, lets make some hook mover that aren’t three times as powerful as FIDE’s queen: This hook mover is a variation on the Griffion; instead of starting with a diagonal move, it starts with an orthogonal move. If the piece moves more than three squares, it must bend 45 degrees on the third square it moves to, then move outward diagonally.We don’t have the complete rules of Dai-Dai Shogi here, but the Wikipedia is your friend; you can also play this game in Zillions (yes, Jeff Mallett deserves your $25 to register the game if you haven’t done so already)
This is, if you will, a limited subset of a hook mover; unlike a Dai-Dai Shogi hook mover, its hook rotation is 45 degrees, not 90 degrees, and it can only make the hook after moving precisely one square
Here is the same piece’s move if it’s on the edge of an 8x8 board:
Like other sliders, this piece can have its move blocked.How valuable is this piece? Somewhere between a rook and queen in value.
There’s also the diagonal version of this piece:
Which is probably a little less valuable than the orthogonal version shown above.Is this a simple piece? I’m not entirely sure. When I first saw the Griffion in, as I recall, New Rules For Classic Games (or was it Murray’s A History of Chess) I was very confused by this piece, but today it makes perfect sense to me.
We can have versions of this piece that bends after moving only square (the Griffion in the diagonal form), after two squares, after four squares, etc. We can have a version of this piece that bends 90 degrees instead of 45 degrees (the diagonal version of this piece is colorbound). We can limit the range of the piece. Etc.
Jose: Since you mentioned Ajax Capablanca Chess as a game with simple moves (add a non-capturing king move to the pieces), may I suggest Ajax Schoolbook. I should add that as a variant to the Zillions preset for Schoolbook. I really like the bishop + non-capturing Wazir piece; it nicely solves all of the headaches one has coming up with a board setup for colorbound pieces.