Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

Janggi - 장기 - Korean Chess. The variant of chess played in Korea. (9x10, Cells: 90) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Charles Daniel wrote on Fri, Jun 27, 2008 09:08 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
This game (and several others) have the lame knight and lame zebra (here elephant). That is both pieces are incapable of moving to destination if path is blocked. For the elephant, one can easily add more possible pathways to destination square for example two diagonal and one orthogonal outwards.

Combining the knight and elephant here - and adding alternate paths, one gets the Sliding Sorcerer Knight used in experimental sub-variation of Herculean Chess

As used in Korean Chess, the Elephant /Knight as used here make for excellent play.

However, as previously noted, the two compounded do not make for good game-play as some might expected. I tried it out and was not impressed.
Even worse would be to compound a zebra and camel and adding multiple paths - nothing new of course - (anyone can do this!).

Patenting an already existing idea is truly an insult to the rich history of chess, but it has been done by a few. Fortunately, the few patents for pieces ( not sure how many are out there but one comes to mind) , are for awkward pieces proposed with even more clumsy configurations.

The patent and its well deserved criticism of course do not apply to excellent single function pieces such as the Elephant and Knight used here nor to the interesting Ferz-Camel compound used in Omega Chess nor for that matter the fascinating Ferz/Wazir Sorcerers in Hadean and Herculean Chess.