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Shatranj. The widely played historic Arabian game, predecessor of modern chess. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Thomas McElmurry wrote on Sun, Mar 27, 2005 07:02 AM UTC:

What is the significance of the unusual board coloring in the new Shatranj preset?

🕸📝Fergus Duniho wrote on Sun, Mar 27, 2005 03:47 PM UTC:

It is based on the Ashtapada, the board that may have originally been used
for Chaturanga. In a diagram shown on Jean-Louis Cazaux's website,
certain spaces have X's on them. But when I tried this, it didn't look
good with the pieces also on the X'd squares. So I made a recolored copy
of the board and copied recolored squares to the squares that were X'd in
the diagram. This looked much nicer while highlighting the same squares.

See http://history.chess.free.fr/ashtapada.htm

David Paulowich wrote on Sun, Mar 27, 2005 04:07 PM UTC:

Regarding this board pattern: none of the 16 marked squares can be visited by any Elephant in Shatranj. There are also 16 unmarked squares that cannot be visited. <p>Fergus: Yesterday I sent two comments to Chess Variants Play-by-Mail System - the preset is giving me false (Black King in check) reports.