Paul Townsend wrote on Sat, Oct 11, 2003 09:32 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
During my final year in school (1972/73) I was one of a group who
experimented with all sorts of chess variations, including Ultima. Our
source for the rules was not very good, even the name of the game was
wrong ('Ultama') and there were several flaws in the rules as we had
them - we had to debug them ourselves to make a playable game since we
did
not know of any 'official' source. We got one 'debug' right (the
Withdrawer must move directly away from the piece it is capturing) and
two
wrong: (a) the pawns captured by sandwiching the enemy piece between
*pawns*, not between a pawn and any piece, (b) the chameleon could
capture
pawns even on a diagonal move. In one contrived scenario, the chameleon
captured seven pieces at once by (a) starting off by withdrawing from the
withdrawer, (b) en route leaping a long-leaper, (c) landing in a
quadruple
pawn-sandwich and (d) co-ordinating with its own king to grab the
co-ordinator.
Naturally we tried variations. In one we pinched two large (matching)
corks from the chemistry lab, painted one black and introduced them to
the
game as the Protectors. A piece could move onto a Protector and, for as
long as it stayed there, was immune to capture. Another variation was to
rename the pawns Othellos - a piece captured by them was removed from the
board and replaced by an identical friendly piece.
And we didn't like the name 'co-ordinator' and tried to think of an
alternatve without success. Many years later I coined the Sindarin
(Elvish) word 'palangurth' based on two radicals meaning 'death from
afar' with reference to its method of capture.
During my final year in school (1972/73) I was one of a group who experimented with all sorts of chess variations, including Ultima. Our source for the rules was not very good, even the name of the game was wrong ('Ultama') and there were several flaws in the rules as we had them - we had to debug them ourselves to make a playable game since we did not know of any 'official' source. We got one 'debug' right (the Withdrawer must move directly away from the piece it is capturing) and two wrong: (a) the pawns captured by sandwiching the enemy piece between *pawns*, not between a pawn and any piece, (b) the chameleon could capture pawns even on a diagonal move. In one contrived scenario, the chameleon captured seven pieces at once by (a) starting off by withdrawing from the withdrawer, (b) en route leaping a long-leaper, (c) landing in a quadruple pawn-sandwich and (d) co-ordinating with its own king to grab the co-ordinator. Naturally we tried variations. In one we pinched two large (matching) corks from the chemistry lab, painted one black and introduced them to the game as the Protectors. A piece could move onto a Protector and, for as long as it stayed there, was immune to capture. Another variation was to rename the pawns Othellos - a piece captured by them was removed from the board and replaced by an identical friendly piece. And we didn't like the name 'co-ordinator' and tried to think of an alternatve without success. Many years later I coined the Sindarin (Elvish) word 'palangurth' based on two radicals meaning 'death from afar' with reference to its method of capture.