Comments by Adrian King

I am registered, at last, and my revision to Scirocco has been posted.

On most days, I think I'd say a 2D chesslike game without drops feels cramped on a board smaller than 10 x 10. In part that is because I like short-ranged pieces, but a game with just short-ranged pieces is drawish when there are too few of them. 10 x 10 is about the size where you can put enough short-ranged pieces on the board to reduce the number of draws to decent levels.

As for 'normally ranged' pieces (which I assume means pieces that can cross the board in a single move), I think they work fine on a board of any size, but games where such pieces are in the minority and shorter-ranged pieces in the majority feel more natural. This is more true on larger boards, where it can become difficult visually to follow a long movement path (I've never played Taikyoku Shogi, and probably never will, but I'm pretty sure I'd get confused about which piece a Bishop attacks when it's halfway across the board, especially since the board squares are all the same color).

Thanks, Mr. Smith, for some comments that are actually germane to this game. (The comment section for the original version of Scirocco somehow turned into a discussion on the perfectibility of chess variants in general, not something I had in mind when I created a very specific game.)

I'm disinclined to remove the Dervish, since it's one of the pieces that gives this game its particular flavor. It's not a weak piece, considering the company it keeps; it's stronger than a majority of the unpromoted pieces in the game. I have given some thought to making it stronger, though, allowing to relay Firzan power as well as Alfil and Dabbaba, still with the constraint that the destination must be adjacent to the Dervish. I think I'll try this as an experiment, although it might make the Dervish too strong -- I don't want to turn it from *an* important piece into *the* important piece, since that role is intended for the Scirocchi.

The Harpy, on the other hand, I've long felt a little uneasy about. It plays reasonably well in Typhoon, where you are more likely to get one while you have plenty of weak pieces on the board that can benefit from a Knight relay, but in Scirocco, where there are fewer pieces to start with, that happens less often. I'm thinking of redefining it (in both games) in a way that is a compromise between its current power and your suggestion for the Dabbaba promotion: namely, that it moves as a Queen and relays Knight power along Queen lines. Again, I'll try this as an experiment, but reserve the right not to adopt the change if I don't like the results.

As for the starting array, I'm not terribly attached to the current one. My initial idea was to do what I did in Typhoon: that is, to allow you to swap any piece with the one on the same rank that is the same distance from the vertical midline of the board, provided that the overall result had either mirror symmetry or rotational symmetry. However, I decided that people would find it too troublesome to make this adjustment, which (mostly) has a pretty minor effect on gameplay. I settled on the current array, which is serviceable, pretty arbitrarily. Do you think anyone would actually go the trouble of choosing a piece arrangement at the start of each game, or (in Zillions, anyway) accept a randomly chosen arrangement?

The Stork, Goat, and Guard, as well as the current promotions of Alfil and Dabbaba, I'm pretty attached to. They are admittedly a bit quirky and asymmetrical, but after a decade I think I've had enough time to consider them fairly carefully, and they make for a pretty game in practice, if not in theory.

I think someone should come up with a successor to taikyoku shogi, which is
obviously too small.

Since the two largest known shogis are on boards 25 x 25 and 36 x 36, and
since there also exist shogis of size 9 x 9 and 16 x 16, I'd assume the
next in the sequence would be 49 x 49.

Someone with plenty of free time should undertake this. Preferably someone
young and healthy.

I've revised this game with the new Dervish and Harpy I described in previous posts, and put a link to the new game on the ZRF page (but I haven't figured out how to replace the main ZRF link, if I can do that).

Let me know if you have a chance to try it out.

Scirocco wouldn't have been much of an inspiration if I hadn't decided to incorporate some of it in something else, would it?

When I first came up with these games, I thought of Scirocco as the main event, and Typhoon as a sideshow. After playing with them both for a long time, I think the reverse is true; Typhoon (if you have the patience) is the better game. At least, it is if you like variety: because there are so many piece types, and because each piece promotes differently, and because the promoted pieces are so different from one another, it seems as if every endgame is different—almost like a different game entirely.

This game has a lot of Chu Shogi in it, as you'll notice if you look at the arrays for each game. The Japanese figured out a long time ago that it wasn't necessary for pieces to have symmetrical moves in order to have a good game—allowing asymmetry greatly increases the space of pieces you can choose from, which means you can better fine-tune piece values and piece interactions.

The new Typhoon ZRF doesn't seem to be in the index yet, but if you have Zillions and are impatient, it's here.

The new Typhoon ZRF has a bug that sometimes allows the Longleaper to capture pieces in a direction at right angles to the direction it moves.

I appear to have exceeded my upload limit for the day by accidentally uploading the .zrf file itself instead of the .zip file, and I still don't seem to be able to replace the .zip file that's there, but I'll try to install the fix tomorrow.

I've been thinking that too many Typhoon endgames wind up with a Genie.

The whole point of a big game like this is the feeling of surprise-within-familiarity. One game of Typhoon should be enough like another that you feel you can learn the game well enough to master it, but games shouldn't be so alike that you get the been-there-done-that feeling on a regular basis.

(If you just like novelty for its own sake, you can just play smaller games. The game invention rate at this site appears to be on the order of one a day, and most are smaller than Typhoon.)

Anyway, I've been conducting an experiment that weakens the Salamander: it can't move more than one space unless it ends adjacent to a friendly piece. So far, this seems to be having the desired effect of reducing the frequency of Salamanders promoting to Genies (the Salamander used to charge unescorted deep into the promotion zone in many games). The few endgames I've checked so far use a greater variety of promoted pieces than I saw in the past.

I'll probably settle on this rule change, but I'll try it out for a little longer first.

The fix is in for the Longleaper.

I've also updated the Salamander to have the restriction that it must land next to a friendly piece when moving more than one step. My experiments with this restriction seem to result in a greater variety of endgames.

>  3-Ds are just 2 or more layers of 2-Ds, unnecessary contrivance, when you could just lay the whole smear end to end in nice flat canvas.

Strictly speaking, of course, 2-dimensional games can also be represented as 1-dimensional games. A 1-dimensional layout is simpler mathematically (and game-playing software often stores a game's positions in a 1-dimensional array), but the human visual system generally does better with 2 dimensions than with either 3 or 1.

Exactly what this says about the relationship between mathematical tidiness and playability, I'm not sure.

First, the answers:

1. If a relay piece (eg a Relay-Ferz) is empowered by a Doubler, can it relay moves to two other pieces in a single turn?
   • Yes.

2. If a piece is empowered by an enemy Doubler, and uses its first turn to capture that Doubler, does it still get a second turn?
   • Yes.

3. If a Fiery Dragon is empowered by a Doubler, does it burn pieces on the end of each go, or only after the second go?
   • At the end of each go.

4. According to your rules, if the Halmopper captures by a single Grasshopper move, it may then make a series of Grasshopper moves as a second move, possibly ending in a second capture. However if it takes two Grasshopper-leaps to capture on its first move, it cannot make any subsequent move. Is this correct?
   • No. The original phrasing is misleading. A Halmopper may make a complete Halmopper-style series of leaps, resulting in a capture (or any other legal Halmopper move), as the first part of its doubled move. From the destination square, it can make another complete Halmopper move.

Now, the philosophy underlying the answers.

Most of the special effects in this game (that is, actions other than simple movement and capture by displacement) can be described straightforwardly in terms of an “acting piece” that causes something to happen. For example, a Hummingbird that exchanges places with some other piece is the acting piece, but both pieces move. In the case of relay piece, the acting piece doesn't move, but some other piece does.

Two invariable rules in the games in this family are:

• On every turn, there is always a single acting piece, and it is a friendly piece (owned by the player whose turn it is).

• Promotion by the normal mechanism can occur only if the acting piece both moves and ends its turn in the promotion zone.

Doubling, immobilization, and poisoning work in a more complicated manner than the “acting piece” model allows. They have to, because they may be effects of opposing pieces, and an opposing piece can't be the acting piece.

The “latent effects” of doubling, immobilization, and poisoning can be understood by imagining a phase that takes place between the turns of the two players during which the pieces with latent powers distribute “cards” that modify other pieces' normal moves. The algorithm goes like this:

1. All cards from the previous turn are removed.

2. Each piece with a latent effect distributes its cards to the affected places. Some cards (doubling, immobilization) are delivered to the pieces in those places; others are just left in the affected squares (poisoning).

   Distributing cards is not considered an action, so immobilized pieces distribute their cards as usual.

3. Duplicate cards on the same square or in the possession of the same piece are discarded, so that, for example, there is no doubled doubling.

4. The next player's turn takes place. If a piece in possession of a card acts, it obeys the instructions on the card.

5. At the end of the player's turn, each piece located on a space with a card on it must obey the instructions on the card.

The doubling card says to the piece that holds it: after you act (possibly including promoting according to the normal rules!), discard this card, and, if you want, act again.

The immobilizing card says to the piece that holds it: you can't act, except to capture yourself (but you can still be acted upon, and you still have to obey any cards on the space where you're located at the end of the turn).

The poisoning card (which comes in two colors, one for each player) says to the piece on the space where it is located: if you are an enemy of the piece who poisoned this space, remove yourself from the board.

And now the reasoning behind the answers:

1. Because relaying is an action, a doubled relayer can perform it twice if two pieces are in range. (The relayer does not relay a doubled move to the piece it moves.)

   (It would be completely reasonable to formulate relaying in terms of cards, too; you can imagine a card that lets you move as some other piece. But that's not how it works in this game.)

2. Capturing an enemy Doubler doesn't take away the card that that Doubler gave you.

3. The burning that takes place on your turn is actually a capture by approach, and it is an inherent part of each phase of the doubled FiD move. During the interturn phase, the FiD also poisons the spaces around its final destination, but that poison doesn't take effect until the end of the turn.

   (Mutual capture of one FiD approaching another occurs because the moving FiD captures the stationary one by approach, but the poison left by the stationary FiD kills the moving one at the end of the turn.)

4. The Halmopper follows the above algorithm, like every other piece.

   The only complication with the Halmopper is that you can't distinguish a series of noncapturing Halmopper leaps as a single move from the same series split into a double move (after which leap does the split occur?). This gives Zillions fits but should not be a problem for humans.

I can't find any reference to the East and West General, either. I think it's because I never put them in this game. But surely there's room for them in Jupiter's successor...

Some of the ambiguities in the rules are clarified (I hope) in the revision at http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSjupiter%28revise.

One answer to the charge of unnecessary complexity in Jupiter is that complexity was the point: I was trying to see just how much I could fit into one game, while still making it feel something like chess.

Another answer is that I wanted to see how the various move geometries and abilities interact. What makes a piece with unconventional abilities more or less valuable? How much does its value depend on its location relative to other pieces on the board, or on the unconventional abilities of those other pieces? To answer questions like these, perhaps the complexity is necessary after all.

Because I've never gotten a computer to play Jupiter, I haven't yet figured out the answer for this particular set of pieces. But Typhoon, which is basically a subset of Jupiter, is a lot of fun.