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Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.
It feels a bit silly to adapt a notation to the shortcomings of a particular font, but the - and ~ here are nearly indistinguishable for me on my desktop. (Not on my tablet, though!?) So I was looking for alternatives that also convey the intuitive notion of optional versus mandatory. How about ? and ! for this? So [F?fsR] would be the Griffon, and [F!fsR] the one that does not have the F move. The Tamerlane Picket would be [F!fB]. The area move from Tenjiku Shogi would be [K?K?K]. I am not sure ! would be intuitively better than - , though, as a mandatory sequel.
I kind of like the ?, though. In most cases it would make it unnecessary to allow zero steps in a slider leg; you could use ? in front of it instead. I admit that this would not work if there are still other legs following the slider leg you want to cut short, (such as with the Fox), because these would then be cut off the move too. But the F and D moves of the Fox are a rather non-intuitive consequence of the general description, so I would not consider it bad if it needed to be mentioned separately. (As the textual description indeed does!) Like [W-fsB-fsW][W-W].
Of these notations, the Interactive Diagram currently only fails to understand the Ship, Wide/Narrow Moa (v or s would be applied to the first leg, not the move as a whole), and the Unicorn (N and B are not 'commensurate' atoms, and it would use NN in the second leg). I already solved the problem of incompatible strides in the first two legs (B, R, Q after D, A, G or H) by automatically slipping in transparent steps to get the initial leap. I suppose I would have to add some dedicated code for Q after N as well (and perhaps after C and Z?). Depending on whether the second leg is B or R the initial N leap should be either layed out as a Mao or a Moa, to align the second step with the f direction of the original second leg. For Q after N we would have a problem, as it is not clear anymore whether the most-outward direction is the adjacent diagonal or orthogonal slide. But I guess it would be no big loss to declare that illegal.