Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Tue, Aug 9, 2011 03:58 AM UTC:
Yudhishthira replied, 'Ye sons of the Kuru race, ye bulls among men, hear
what I shall do on appearing before king Virata. Presenting myself as a
Brahmana, Kanka by name, skilled in dice and fond of play, I shall become
a courtier of that high-souled king. And moving upon chess-boards
beautiful pawns made of ivory, of blue and yellow and red and white hue,
by throws of black and red dice. I shall entertain the king with his
courtiers and friends. And while I shall continue to thus delight the
king, nobody will succeed in discovering me. And should the monarch ask
me, I shall say, 'Formerly I was the bosom friend of Yudhishthira.' I
tell you that it is thus that I shall pass my days.

Now replaceing 'chess-boards' with 'boards' and 'pawns' with 'pieces', 
we still have a very interesting verse here!

It is true there is not very much detail here, about the game, but that 
is to be expected. There is a drama going on in the life of Yudhishthira 
and his brothers, and he is explaining how he will disguise himself. That 
is the main purport of his talk. So, let's look at what we have about the game.

We have a game, played with dice, on a board, with pieces of four specified colors. There is no mention of piece movements at all, but, this is to be expected isn't it, Yudhishthira is talking about how he will disguise himself, not talking really about the game, which is not the main point.

Now John, you say .. 'So we have a gameboard, dice, and pieces of four specified colors but NO MENTION OF DIFFERENT TYPES. Not chess, probably pachisi.'
I don't understand why you say 'not chess, probably pachisi', can you explain why you say this. It seems to me that a game with dice, board, and pieces of 4 different colors could be 'Chaturaji'.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Chaturanga

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
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.