Comments by FergusDuniho

While H. G. Muller and Jean-Louis Cazaux have qualified their criticisms by saying they are not editors, they are among the regular contributors who are most qualified to be editors, and their criticisms are valid. This page needs to be fixed up a lot, and I will wait for appropriate changes to be made before publishing it.

I will also note that some people would have religious objections to pieces with demonic names. When Hans was running this site, he would not allow some Shogi variants that included demon pieces. While I don't share his religious beliefs, and I assume Japanese demons are not quite the same thing as Christian demons, I see more of a problem with a game that allows for summoning demons in the more usual western sense. I will also point out that the pieces called Demon and Demoness are more commonly known as Dragon King and Dragon Horse, these being the names they have in Shogi.

That should be fixed now. There was a typo that may have been due to copying and pasting code without making all the appropriate changes.

I corrected some of the formatting of this page. However, the graphics need to be fixed. The setup diagram appears to be incomplete, and it looks like you tried to paste graphic images onto the page. This will not work. What you need to do is upload each of your images and add proper links to them. There is a link for this in the Edit menu when you are logged in.

It's not clear what the rules of promotion are in this game.

This is looking better now, and I have unhid it.

There is nothing wrong with the mechanism of summoning itself. What wrecks things is that you automatically get the Demon back in hand when it gets captured.

Compared to how other pieces normally put themselves at risk when capturing a piece, this is like giving one piece a WMD. So, I would propose putting some kind of restriction or limitation on this.

Giving the opponent two moves, knowing that he has those, is too costly, though.

Where does this come in? Summoning is a full move, and I didn't see any mention of lettings players move twice in a turn.

Nevermind. I see it is a cost to summoning that Sam proposed. It's not in the creator's description of the game.

Ever since I played a game with Greg that ended in an impasse, I felt this game may be too drawish, and I've sometimes considered changing the rules to fix this. The rule change I was thinking of was to forbid Kings from crossing to the other side of the board and to give them the ability to check each other from a distance, as in Eurasian Chess. However, it has come up that Shogi has its own rule for handling impasses, and there are alternatives to it.

The rule in Shogi is if each King has moved to the opponent's camp, which is the ranks the opponent's pieces start on, players may agree that an impasse has been reached and count pieces to determine the winner. Kings count for nothing, Rook and Bishops, promoted or not, each count 5, and other pieces each count 1. A player with less than 24 points loses. Because of the piece attrition in Kamikaze Mortal Shogi, it is possible that each side would have less than 24 points. So, instead, it could be played with the rule that whoever has more points wins. But I don't like this counting solution, and others don't too.

An alternative rule proposed for Shogi is called the Try rule. This involves winning by moving one's own King to the space the opponent's King began on. I don't know if this involves moving there only if it is safe or if it becomes a condition only after both Kings have crossed into the enemy camp. I would propose making it a winning condition only if both Kings have crossed into the opponent's camp and it moves there safely.

Similar to this is the Campmate rule, which allows a player to win by reaching the last rank with his King. I would propose the same conditions on it that I am proposing for the Try rule.

Another possibility for dealing with impasse is to reverse the directions that the opponent's pieces may move when the King moves into the opponent's camp. Additionally, pieces could be allowed to treat their own camp as a promotion zone when the opponent's King is there. These changes would discourage players from moving their Kings to the other side of the board without strictly forbidding it.

One more possibility is to allow Kings to check each other from a distance but to not forbid Kings from crossing to the other side. Instead, the ability of Kings to check each other from a distance would usually prevent both Kings from crossing to the other side, and if they happened to do so by having another piece between them on the same rank, this ability would provide an incentive for leaving the King more exposed.

Okay, I made a few edits and published this. I checked Small and unchecked Modest, because this is a 7x7 game that does not use the usual equipment.

A graphic diagram would be nice. Unfortunately, we don't have any images matching your piece names. So, you may have to draw them yourself. FYI, the usual convention is to use capitals for White's pieces and lowercase for Black's.

I have published this. I would recommend using P for the Pawns and another letter for the Berolina Pawns, since if this game is ever programmed for Game Courier, every piece will need to be identified by notation.