Rated Comments

For as long as I have known about the games with the Rook-Knight and Bishop-Knight added, I have agreed that adding just them unbalances the game even further towards the line pieces than Chess already is. This is the main reason I have made an alternate history where Capablanca looks outside of the modern descendants of the Western tradition for help in designing his proposed “next stage of Chess”. I made him look all the way to Japan simply because the first place I had thought to post the idea was the 81Dojo forum. However, the other idea I have always had was that he would simply invent a “Great Carrera” with the missing pieces (King-Knight, Queen-Knight and two step Knightrider). This game would have been possible to play with the King-Knight, two step Knightrider or Rook-Knight doubled if the players wanted.

hi

I've played the heck out of this via Ai Ai, and I absolutely adore this game. I prefer the greater piece density and the more interesting piece mix here to those of Grand Chess. The resulting play is interesting and nuanced both tactically and strategically. In my opinion Opulent Chess is one of the finest 10x10 variants.

My one complaint is the presence of Pawn promotion by replacement, but that's not particular to this game, I just dislike it everywhere. Promoting stuff is fun and interesting, so I prefer just being able to promote to any piece without restriction. After all I'm a Shogi player, and what can I say, we like promoting stuff! I also dislike some of the weird effects the rule can produce in rare circumstances, but that's more of an aesthetic objection. I do like the extended promotion zone though.

On the whole, a delightful game. Strongly recommended to anyone with an interest in decimal variants.

I've been playing a lot of this game recently (via Ai Ai), partly for my own enjoyment and partly as inspiration for my own 16x16 experiments. There are relatively few modern Chess variants played on 16x16, and for me, this game is the best example thus far.

The variety of pieces presented here is at first intimidating, but one soon realises there is a logic to everything presented here, and shortly thereafter you'll find the piece movements become natural. The balance of the initial position is excellent, with every piece finding its way into the fight without too much awkward development. Games are long -- against AI at 2 minutes/move my games take at least 400 plies, with my longest so far at 695 -- but as a large Shogi variant fanatic this doesn't bother me at all. Throughout those long games one will find drama, excitement, and plentiful opportunities for subtlety and subterfuge.

If I were very picky, I might say that I'd like to see the Rook + Camel/Bishop + Camel compounds in here, which I find really fun on a large board. Also the basic leapers -- Camel, Giraffe, Knight -- feel less impactful in a game this size. Having said that, everything works well together, and I enjoy this game tremendously.

But why the limitation to set up queen and archbishop on different coloured squares, when they can change the square colour by moving like rook resp. knight?

What If They Castle Do they Tell you?

Is there any .ZRF file for this game?

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Big thanks to Malcolm Webb for programming the zrf for this game! I would like those who download this to know that as of this date in 2022, I have updated the rules to Ito Shogi drastically, while the rules of this zrf file are based on the 2007 rules.

The Wolf is ranked higher (stronger) than the Dog.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/鬥獸棋

象>獅>虎>豹>狼>狗>貓>鼠

Elephant > Lion > Tiger > Leopard (Panther) > Wolf > Dog > Cat > Rat

I played this since childhood. This is the proper ranking of the animals.

The confusion about Dog > Wolf happened because on some of the cheap chess pieces, the wood carving of the Dog and the Wolf are almost identical.

I love the concept of spherical chess. I think one thing needs to be changed, however. Chess is already drawish enough on a square board, and more so on a round board. On a spherical board, where pieces move in all directions, draws may become the overwhelming norm. That is not my preference.

So, on a board like this, I would love to see something done about that. Possible ways to do it would be to put some restrictions on the movement of the King (as in XiangQi and Janggi), or to immobilize the King when in check, or to take away the King's ability to capture pieces, including attacking pieces.

https://samiam.org/chessv continues to host the ChessV software, and, indeed, has been updated to have version 2.2 of ChessV. Should chessv.org ever go down, this is an alternate download link.

A while ago, I looked at 31 possible short range pieces. I have now expanded this research.

I have written a small C program which looks at all 16,777,215 possible leapers that move at most two squares. Some findings:

• I expected around half of all possible pieces to be colorbound in some way. Wrong. 16,452,080 (over 98%) pieces are not colorbound.
• There are 104 non-colorbound pieces with three moves, 2,512 pieces with four moves, and some 2,696,337 pieces with 12 moves.
• Only 2,944 possible pieces are Bishop colorbound: These relatively few pieces can go to the same 32 squares a Bishop can go to.

With some 16,452,080 non-colorbound pieces, if we replace the knight, bishop, and queen with a random non-colorbound short leaper, that gives us 4,453,099,898,116,838,912,000 which is, what, 4 hextillion possible variants, and that’s keeping the king, pawns, and rook.

OK, if that’s not enough possible variants, we can also add the ability for a given random piece to be able to be a rider in any direction it can leap (e.g. a fers-rider is our bishop; a wazir-rider is a rook, and a knight-rider is, well, a knightrider), where we randomly choose, from all the moves a given leaper has, for it to be able to ride in a random number of directions. For example, if we look at the wazir, then randomly choose which directions it moves like a rook and which directions it can only move one square, we get 16 possible pieces. If we do this for all 16,452,080 non-colorbound short range pieces, we get some 282,232,643,280 possible pieces, just over 2 to the power of 38 (2^38 or 2 ** 38 in Python notation).

This means an 8x8 board with random non-colorbound pieces and using a standard chess set has some 6,344,961,231,517,063,209,074,884,200,517,463,972,290,560,000 possible variants (the pawns and kings can keep their moves), just over 2 to the power of 152.

The Heroine and Popess piece types in this variant arguably (nicely) complete the combination of compound pieces I used in my own (earlier) 10x10 Sac Chess variant.

On the topic of piece names, I've noticed that in some languages the name for a chess rook translates to ship (or to boat, also). Thus 'Admiral' (or my choice of 'Sailor', in Sac Chess) gets bonus points as a choice of name, perhaps (for the piece type in question, a promoted rook in shogi), i.e. a person who uses a watercraft's power.

Maybe there's a slightly related argument that a real-life knight, in the past, is a person who uses a horse (arguably knight is a more elevated title than horseman, which would also work).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rook_(chess)#Name_translations

I think one thing the author may do until when and if this variant gets formally published here is to make a Zillions of Games implementation of it, then send an email to Ed van Zon to get the implementation published. There can be a long delay before a submission and its publication here, but Ed’s pretty good about publishing a submission within a week of its submission.

The hard part is taking all these rules and converting them in to Zillions’ quirky language. I enjoy doing it myself; it converts rules in to unambiguous machine-readable rules, and it allows people to play the variant themselves.

I would also change the name of the summoned pieces in to something like, oh, Dragon Horse and Dragon King, the Anglicized form of these pieces’ names in Shogi. I like the summoning tactic, but it’s an open question whether having it makes the White advantage overwhelming. People seem to enjoy Crazyhouse a lot over at Lichess, so I think this summoning mechanic can be very usable.

(I should also point out that Betza called what is the Jester here the “Waffle”)

i think so

Just over twenty years after the initial publication of this page, the first ever computer implementation of Nemoroth is live, complete with a basic alpha-beta pruning AI. You can play in your browser at this link: https://azgoroth.itch.io/nemoroth

The only thing I haven't implemented is the Go Away push order, which I've been putting off due to how laborious the UI considerations are. As a placeholder, Go Away pushes are clockwise from top.

I originally wrote this implementation in TypeScript, but the AI was too slow and I ported it over to C++ using WebAssembly. I plan on open sourcing it eventually once I have more opportunities to clean up the code. This is one of the most difficult software projects I have ever worked on; I have known about Nemoroth since around 2013 but was not a strong enough of a programmer to pull it off until now.

I found a number of ambiguities in these rules, which I have tried my best to address reasonably on the linked page. Some have been covered in this comments section, some not (for example, if a Wounded Fiend leaves an already ichorated square, does the ichor stack to 11+ plies or max out at 10?).

The AI is surprisingly dangerous. It mobilizes the Ghast immediately and WILL advance it to d4/d5 if you let it, usually costing you the game. I have managed to beat it a few times, but it's tough as nails for how crude the programming is. Beware!

Ralph, if you're out there, thanks for this amazing variant. I tried to email you to get permission to make this but alas, I never heard back.

Marsellais chess has a rule where each player moves 2 pieces in the same turn. Castling is considered a single move. All other castling rules apply.

I have a code to create Piece in Piececlopedia. I’ve taken your template and written my text.