Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Sam Trenholme writes: [2006-10-18] '... I really like the ideas presented here. I'm a little worried about powerful short range pieces making attack too difficult and defense too easy (My perpetual worry about a game being too drawish).'

Greg Strong writes: [2006-10-18] 'Sam, your comment makes me wonder about something. You raise the possibility that short-range pieces may make defense easier than attack. Do you think that making the short-range pieces have more forward-movement capability than backward capability would mitigate this?'

Joe and I are currently playtesting his GREAT SHATRANJ pieces on a 12x8 board. The slow moving General (Guard) has been replaced by a third Rook in each army. Twelve forward-moving Pawns, with unlimited promotions, will threaten to overwhelm the defense in the endgame phase.

My 10x10 variants include: Opulent Lemurian Shatranj, using some of Joe's 'midrange' pieces, and Shatranj Kamil X, with a collection of weaker pieces ranging from the Ferz to the Cannon. (I have already given this page an excellent rating.)

Let me be contrarian yet again. David quotes Sam and Greg, who question whether the Great Shatranj game is drawish because it has all shortrange pieces. I argued over 2 years ago that the most drawish of my shatranj games would be Modern Shatranj, because it has the smallest front - 8 squares across - and Great [and Grand and others] would be less drawish, because they have wider fronts and no longrange pieces. I just looked at the game logs for Modern Shatranj, and, of 18 completed games, 6 are draws [okay 5 of them are me, but I did win 4 more]. My prediction is that there are no draws in the other 2 games...
Great Shatranj - 9 games completed, no draws
Grand Shatranj - 9* games completed, 1 draw
Oops. Well, 2 things. One, the 9* is closer to 7, because 2 of my games timed out after a few moves. Two, 1 of 16 or 1 of 18 is considerably less than 6 of 18. I still maintain that more powerful pieces on a narrower front create more draws, specifically because you can clog up that narrow front with a few weak pieces supported by strong longrange pieces. Now, I don't play or follow FIDE chess, but several people onsite have mentioned excessive draws in that game as a problem. Some of it, I gather, is because masters apparently agree to draws beforehand, but why are all those games drawn? What are the tactical and strategic reasons they draw? I will venture to guess it's because weak pieces clog up the middle of the 8x8, supported by the power pieces. It becomes too expensive to break through, then; it's a case of whoever attacks, loses, in those cases, no?

I posted a couple of variants here -- Scirocco and Typhoon -- about a
decade ago. Both are heavy on short-range pieces, and if you'll excuse my
immodesty, I still like the way they look. They might play well, too, but
I've never played them except against Zillions, and I don't know of
anyone else who's played them at all.

Scirocco is a 10 x 10 game, which seems about the right size to me for a
basic chess variant. Typhoon is 12 x 12, with the same number of pieces
(in the same relative positions) as Chu Shogi, which is apparently more
than most people are willing to take on, although Zillions playing a game
this size against itself makes wonderful wallpaper. I've never seen a
draw in either game.

With Scirocco I included an 8 x 8 variant, Shatranjirocco, with the same
number of pieces (of about the same strength) as in Shatranj. This game
*is* drawish, probably almost as much so as Shatranj.

The points I'd like to make are:

. I think Mr. Joyce is right in saying that 8 x 8 games are, as a rule,
too drawish. You have to introduce something like drops in order to make a
game that size complex enough to hold human interest for more than a few
centuries.

. And I agree with Mr. Joyce again about FIDE chess. Part of the problem
here is that the stronger pieces are too much stronger than the weak
pieces; too often it's hard to arrange exchanges of approximately equal
value (except of pieces of the same type), so from many positions it only
makes sense to play defensively. If the pieces available to exchange are
closer in value, it becomes a lot more plausible to exchange material for
a positional advantage.

. For all the interest weaker pieces have in the opening and the midgame,
they are tiresome to try to checkmate with, at least if you're using
traditional, unconfined Kings and no drops. For that reason I like the
Shogi-style every-piece-promotes-in-the-end-zone convention: it all but
guarantees that even large variants come to an end in a reasonable amount
of time. (I don't care for the promtion-on-capture rule of some of the
giant Shogis, because it puts too much power on the board too early and
obscures the role of the weaker pieces.)

. There remain a number of directions in which to push the invention of
short-range pieces. The great Shogis concentrate mainly on movement
patterns: with a few interesting exceptions, they are combinations of
leaping and short ranging movements through empty spaces, in either case
capturing by displacement. However, there are other things pieces can do:
consider, for example, shorter-range versions of Ultima or Rococo pieces.
I tried to explore a little of this space in my not-quite-finished 16 x 16
variant Jupiter, but you could certainly use many of the same ideas on a
smaller board.

Thank you for the comments and the rating, Mr King [and please call me Joe, I'm not a very formal person]. It seems I may have been too pessimistic in my view when this was written; there are many very nice shortrange pieces in the world of chessvariants. What they really need is good promotion in an advertising sense, rather than a chess sense [though, as Scirocco shows, they can be promoted both ways]. 

What I have tried to do is show that short range does not necessarily mean weak. How weak is the king, as a piece? A pair of moderately powerful pieces, the NAF and the NDW, the shortrange analogs of the archbishop and chancellor, moving only 2 squares max, can drive the king to oblivion very quickly in a game of Great Shatranj, for example. There are a lot of simple, easy to use and understand shortrange pieces that move 2, 3 or 4 squares at most, that do very well on any size board. They provide a variety to the games that the 'vast array' of infinite sliders doesn't.

I've found that complicated chess variants are a lot less so when there's
a visual reminder of how the pieces move. Using a piece set for Scirocco
like the one I made for Zillions, I don't think the game is particularly
difficult to grasp, at least into the midgame. As you approach the point
where you can promote, you also need a reminder of how each piece
promotes. Zillions lets you do with a mouseover; it also helps to keep on
your screen an alternative setup where every piece starts promoted, so
that you can see the move diagrams on the promoted pieces as well.

I've tried to submit a slight revision of Scirocco to these pages to
smooth out some of its eccentricities, but my submission (like my attempt
to register as a user) seems to have gotten lost. If you give me your
e-mail address, I can mail you a copy directly.

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).

Interesting question, George, and a temptation to hubris. I think there are different answers to your questions, depending on who is asked. Our goal in this project was to nudge the CV world toward seeing shortrange pieces as valuable in themselves. If you're out there, Christine - congrats! It actually worked! It was, way back at the beginning, Christine's idea to do a shatranj collaboration that started the project. And, for this website, it got a very good response. A number of people made games for it. And new people have referenced it in their short range games. So, I think that what's really come out of the project is that others are more willing to use shortrange pieces as main pieces in games, not just filler. In this little corner of the world, that rates as success. In the wider world, who knows? I suspect that in the future many of our games will be played by the multi-billions of people online. This is because we will have actually playtested them, and some of the good ones will survive.

As for the best pieces coming out of the project, I can't say. The hero and shaman are the most unique, and my personal opinion is that David Paulowich's Opulent Lemurian Shatranj is a true test of chess skill on the highest levels. 

But what I see is that the elephant [AF] and warmachine [DW] are showing up more, sometimes in a slightly different guise. Greg Strong's use of Betza's half duck [HFD], the scout [HW], which is an interesting, if twisted, knight analog, and the griffon [NHW] has apparently gotten people to look more, and use more, those sorts of pieces.

This points up another difference in short range pieces, awkwardness, a measure of how easy or not it is to use a piece. Compare the half duck to the linear hero [D+W]. Each reaches [up to] 12 squares, with a max range of 3. Each has stepping and leaping ability. Both color change. In fact, they both reach 8 of the same squares, of their respective 12. But the hero is an easier piece to use than the half duck. Some prefer that, some prefer it the other way. 

One other thing the project looked at was larger boards. I encouraged Gary Gifford to make larger boards for his game, and he put together some interesting variants, where the pieces stayed the same, and the board changed. No one has picked up on this, but size does matter...

As far as spreading the games, TSRP is also on zillions with 30ish games, if I recall, and some of the shatranj variants have gotten onto free chess software, like Greg's ChessV or HG Muller's chess engines. So games are out there.

The shortest range leaper jumps to the same square he is. So, this he would work as a pass piece.

I made a zillion of games test variant, where knights moved to the same square they are only, and are used to pass the turn.

I changed the itemid for this page, because it is not for Game Courier presets, which is what the MP prefix is for. It now has an MS prefix.

Very nice work, Christine, on the update!