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Chieftain Chess. Missing description (16x12, Cells: 192) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Jan 20, 2011 02:11 PM UTC:
I am a lot more skeptical about this. The activation range of the Chieftains is pretty large (a well-placed Chieftain covers a 7x7 area), so pretty much all your pieces can be activated all the time, as long as you have 4 Chieftains. In fact you can have duplicate coverage of most of the board, meaning you could move even both of two pieces standing next to each other. So the activaton rule will not limit your options very much. And multiple moves per turn really blows up the branching ratio. (Compare Arimaa, where you are allowed to only do 4 Wazir moves per turn.)

Because of the short range of the pieces, and the necessity to be active in several places at once (for healthy Chieftain distribution), the game really degenerates into a number of local battles. A human would immediately decouple those in his mind. But a conventional search engine would try to play all possible combinations of playing out the battles.