Ratings & Comments

Getting a Lion out early is OK; it is impervious to stepper attack by its igui capability, and can easily withdraw when chased by sliders because of its jumping ability. And if the opponent develops his Lion, you often have no other way to keep it at bay than opposing it with your own Lion.

But suppose your opponent will keep his sliders safely behind his Pawn wall, and advances his Copper, Silver and Leopard while you are dancing around with your sliders. No matter how fast you develop your sliders, they won't be able to breach the Pawn wall, as this is well protected by the opponent's sliders without him having to spend many moves: his sliders start there. At some point the Silvers and Coppers stream out through the occasional hole in the Pawn wall, and will start forking your valuable sliders, which are trapped in the narrow area between the Pawn walls (usually both sides advance all their Pawns one step without opening up large holes, to allow the Side Movers to cover the original Pawn rank). You will get slaughtered.

Sliders are very valuable in Chu Shogi, because they promote easily in the end-game. Promoting steppers, OTOH is very difficult: they need to approach from afar, and by the time they reach the zone the opponent will oppose them with his steppers, needing far fewer moves to do that. And you have to overcome the extra defense provided by his Side Movers; you cannot neutralize those with your own Side Movers. Basically you can only promote steppers that are left over when all stepper material of the opponent has been traded away. So if there is an imbalance where you have steppers, and the opponent tactically equivalent sliders, and the potential promotion gain is the same, you are toast: he will promote all his sliders long before you promote your first stepper, and this will put you at such a tactical disadvantage that you will not have any steppers left by the time the opponent has not enough material left to prevent them from entering the zone.

In warfare one should never expose one's artillery to infantry attack!

About the strategy part of the article.

From the games I had played against user Dax00 it seems to me the advices here are not optimal although wikipedia states roughly the same things regarding the early moving up of steppers.

In our games dax00 has taught me to early lyon jump in front very early (the latest at turn 3) and then the stronger pieces take relevant forward positions until it becomes worthless for them to keep dancing around, and only then steppers (and maybe phoenix) kick in slowly but surely as the strong pieces are stuck in their duties :)!

What am I missing?

"Pawns may only promote to a piece that has been taken by the opponent" is ambiguous. Does it mean:

• A pawn may not promote to a piece unless at least one of the starting pieces has been taken (and thus the board will always have at most the same set of 7 capturable pieces), i.e. if my opponent captures my rook I may promote only one pawn to a rook and may not promote again until my opponent captures another piece; or
• A pawn may promote to any piece that the opponent has ever captured, i.e. if my opponent captures my rook I may thereafter promote as many pawns to rooks as I please?

As I've programmed the game for Zillions-of-Games, promotion is possible only when a Pawn reaches the last rank by capturing a piece.

I don't find any information about Pawn promotion in Wormhole Chess. Do Pawns promote on the last square they can reach, whatever the rank (for example if there are no squares anymore vertically in front of the Pawn, beyond the wormhole, nor diagonally where an opponent's piece could land)? Or do they only on the last rank, meaning that if a Pawn can't reach the 8th rank anymore, because of the disappearing of squares, he can't promote anymore?

This comment gives me the opportunity to rate this game as 'excellent'. Really great concept and gameplay. It would be great to have a larger variant of Wormhole Chess, 10x10 or even 12x12.

I remember reviewing this page.  I don't have the mentioned email record (maybe I was using the chessvariants@yahoo address back then?).  We had some problems around then with submissions defaulting to "Freederick" as their submitter, hence the comments from Mariano.  I have no idea how the author would have been changed again to erik; Mariano is still a user here, so it's not like some weird thing connected to deletion of users...

Actually, I don't know why the title of the page has "(hidden)" appended either.

I've long forgotten to ask my Romanian friend Aurelian if he happens to live close to Transylvania. :)

Ah ok that's it, CVP is a haunted website... :)

Yes, it is certainly a confusion in the information of the page. I just remarked before you made the modification the very recent date of the page creation, that seemed me strange. Thanks

Or maybe, Halloween ghosts are on :)! Wooohuuuooo!

Since another user claimed authorship of this page in the comments, I updated the author and inventor of this page. I don't know if there was another erik before you. If there was, there is no trace of activity before you joined. Even the page you mentioned has a start date that is later than you joined. I'm not sure why some comments are earlier than the start date for this page. It leaves me wondering if another page had the same ItemID but got deleted. However, the page itself says the game was invented in 2013. So, maybe there was just a screw-up in the information recorded about this page.

I see that this page was written by a certain 'erik'. It is not me. Comments on this game go back to 2013, and I create my CVP account at the end of 2015. Was there any bug (or worse) that caused a confusion? Or in the case where a previous homonymous member existed before I went on CVP, is there nothing that prevents to create an accout with the same user ID than an existing one? Nothing serious for me, but if it happens to other people involved in this website it could be more annoying.

To my understanding archers are meaningless inside the trojan horse besides the fact that they can be dropped :)!