Check out Symmetric Chess, our featured variant for March, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Joe Joyce wrote on Sun, Oct 4, 2009 04:12 PM UTC:
Interesting question, George, and a temptation to hubris. I think there are different answers to your questions, depending on who is asked. Our goal in this project was to nudge the CV world toward seeing shortrange pieces as valuable in themselves. If you're out there, Christine - congrats! It actually worked! It was, way back at the beginning, Christine's idea to do a shatranj collaboration that started the project. And, for this website, it got a very good response. A number of people made games for it. And new people have referenced it in their short range games. So, I think that what's really come out of the project is that others are more willing to use shortrange pieces as main pieces in games, not just filler. In this little corner of the world, that rates as success. In the wider world, who knows? I suspect that in the future many of our games will be played by the multi-billions of people online. This is because we will have actually playtested them, and some of the good ones will survive.

As for the best pieces coming out of the project, I can't say. The hero and shaman are the most unique, and my personal opinion is that David Paulowich's Opulent Lemurian Shatranj is a true test of chess skill on the highest levels. 

But what I see is that the elephant [AF] and warmachine [DW] are showing up more, sometimes in a slightly different guise. Greg Strong's use of Betza's half duck [HFD], the scout [HW], which is an interesting, if twisted, knight analog, and the griffon [NHW] has apparently gotten people to look more, and use more, those sorts of pieces.

This points up another difference in short range pieces, awkwardness, a measure of how easy or not it is to use a piece. Compare the half duck to the linear hero [D+W]. Each reaches [up to] 12 squares, with a max range of 3. Each has stepping and leaping ability. Both color change. In fact, they both reach 8 of the same squares, of their respective 12. But the hero is an easier piece to use than the half duck. Some prefer that, some prefer it the other way. 

One other thing the project looked at was larger boards. I encouraged Gary Gifford to make larger boards for his game, and he put together some interesting variants, where the pieces stayed the same, and the board changed. No one has picked up on this, but size does matter...

As far as spreading the games, TSRP is also on zillions with 30ish games, if I recall, and some of the shatranj variants have gotten onto free chess software, like Greg's ChessV or HG Muller's chess engines. So games are out there.

Edit Form

Comment on the page ShortRange Project

Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.