Comments/Ratings for a Single Item
zcherryz, thanks for the support. I can always use it, and appreciate it muchly. Some people's tastes are amazingly similar. :-) I had some great help on designing this one. Someone with amazingly similar tastes designed it along with me during email conversations. Though some tastes aren't that similar... Charles, thank you for your rating and especially for your comment in reference to chess players' tastes and who might find the game interesting, which I found interesting. I'll have to remember that if I try to hook a 'normal' chess player. And similar pieces must have been designed over and over again. A decent, playable game that presents something new, even if it's only old pieces presented in a new light, is what I hope to manage in a design. Shatranj variants were kind of 'in the air' when I first started doing mine. I like to think I was lucky enough to get some good ones. Not all agree; some do.
While many variants try to balance the number of leapers with sliders, this game takes a different approach. Every piece is a jumper or a 1 square stepping piece. The Queen is replaced by the General, the rooks with dababbas and bishops with Elephants. Then, the game is expanded to a 10x8 similar to a Capablanca variant. The knight compound added to both dababbas and elephant.
The game starts out slow but gets much more tactical. Orthodox chess players with a preference for knights and for positional play and Indian defenses (moving pawn one step at a time) would love this game. Also the Shatranj reference and ruleset adds novelty to this game.Some interesting points: the dababbas and Minister can mate with aid of king. (A bit tricky with the dababba) (Of course the General can too) . The dababba starts out as a weak piece but gets stronger as the game progresses.
The pieces may have been used before as pointed out, but this should be expected. I used the ninja guard which is very similar to elephant in Birds and Ninjaslol, good answer joe :) is a great game, is just people's nature to be jealous and put down
George, thank you for taking the time to look over and comment on this pair of shatranj variants. I especially thank you for the reference to Ralph Betza's Augmented Knights article of 1994. I truly appreciate the historical references; to someone like me, who has just passed 3 years not merely as a member of CV but only being aware this site and the world of chess variants existed, the information is invaluable. The 'D' [for 'dababbah'] variant here is my 4th CV design, created in early-mid 2005 under the working name of 'Shatranj Capablanca'. Its evolution is documented in 'Two Large Shatranj Variants'. This rules page is an abstract from that series of games, posted so any players would have a clear, concise set of rules with no ambiguities, as 2Large is a game system rather than a game, and gives a number of options, though not coming close to your '91.5 Trillion...' series of articles. The 'R' [for 'rook'] version was added later at the suggestion of David Paulowich [as noted in the text], with whom I have had a number of private email discussions on the advisability of using rooks in variant designs. [A bit of trivia: Michael Nelson, in a private email, opposed changing to a rook; he, too, felt the DW piece was a better design fit for this game. I, hoping to see the game played, went both ways. Personally, I prefer the D version, and will play that unless my opponent wishes to use rooks.] Thus, the 2 pictures, which are both initial setups and clickable buttons for presets. As far as names, I have often agreed that I am not good at them. The name 'general' was taken directly from the CVPages rules for historical shatranj; 'elephant' is the English translation of 'al fil', I believe; and the deliberately misspelled 'dababbah' is meant to indicate the piece has an additional wazir move - warmachine seems to be an acceptible substitute. As for prior use of pieces, Joshua Morris posted 'Kozune' 2 months before I posted 2Large, in which he explicitly uses the NAF and NDW pieces. If not for a David Paulowich comment, I would have been unaware of this, because I overlooked Mr. Morris excellent game, thinking it was an Eastern variation with drops. I generally avoid drop variations, as I've only been playing [again, after high school in the 60's] for just over 3 years, and have enough troubles with Western variations. In reading Mr. Betza's work, I find these 2 pieces implied, but not demonstrated, as he adds only one augmentation to the knight in each case. But these are logical and obvious pieces, and I'm sure their original creators are lost in history, just as the AF and DW piece creators are. There is a unifying theme ['slightly' broken by the use of rooks] to this game, that of very short range pieces that are all 2-square leapers. This changes some aspects of the game: there can be no pins, nor can a piece interpose to block a check [in the rookless original variant], as is also noted by Mr. Morris in Kozune. No piece can ever be blocked from moving to any square within its given range of movement, except by a friendly piece occupying the square; all threats are immediate. With your comments here including references to Ralph Betza's work, and that of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Jetan in your recent Chieftain Chess comments, I feel you are praising me with faint damns. As a fledgling CVer, I never anticipated being put in any such lofty company. I look forward to any comments you might make on my Grand, Atlantean Barroom, and Lemurian shatranj variants.
Hey, Greg. The pieces used are all part of a 26 piece set I submitted to go along with the 5 presets I've posted [so far] for 'Two Large Shatranj Variants', 'Grand Shatranj Alfaerie'. The FIDE pieces are there, represented by their customary letters, and some of the ancient chess pieces, like the Ferz and Wazir, are in the set, represented by their customary letters. The 'D' piece actually is a Dabbabah, but I don't use it; instead the piece used is a D+W, which makes it a lot more flexible. Anyway, all the other letters got used up by other pieces, and the last piece and the last letter were the D+W and 'Y'. [As it's the slowest and least 'forward' of all the pieces and I think of it as looking like a sort of large robot lawnmower trundling along, privately I call it the 'Yardboy'. ;-) ] The 'extra' pieces are there to allow people to easily change the preset so they can try out different pieces. The series of games from Modern Shatranj through Atlantean Barroom were put together to look at the effects of changing piece powers, and to be able to do it in a systematic way. Hope that helps. [Hope that makes sense.] Joe
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