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Treyshah. A commercial three-player hexagonal variant with 23 pieces a side. (Cells: 210) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Bn Em wrote on Thu, Dec 16, 2021 08:32 PM UTC in reply to Max Koval from Wed Dec 15 08:10 PM:

the same trouble with the bishop and queen.

It's not entirely clear what the analogous ‘error’ would be. In the REX King's and Glinski Pawns' cases it's using orthogonal moves to the exclusion of hex‐diagonal ones, while this knight apparently just miscounted the diagonal portion, resulting in a piece (which Charles Gilman terms a Student) which is analogous to the square‐cell Zebra.

A queen analogous to the REX king just becomes a rook, but that leaves the bishop completely unaccounted for.

Ofc, there are a few variants which take this version of king and queen as their basis and build the rest of the pieces around them: the oldest is Sigmund Wellisch's 3‐player game (for which this site unfortunately has only a Java Applet, though a more complete description is available e.g. on John Savard's page); the king moves one orthogonally, the knight to any nearest square that the king can't reach (there is a certain logic to calling the hex diagonals ‘leaps’, given that the relevant cells don't actually touch), the rook slides orthogonally, the queen moves as rook or knight (technically a marshal analogue therefore), and the pawn in either of the forwardmost directions (the board being oriented as in Fergus' Hex Shogis).

Alternatively, Gilman's Alternate Orthogonals Hex Chesses do exactly what the name suggests: assign alternate orthogonals as analogous to the square‐board directions, giving a REX king and Glinski pawns together with Wellisch knights, a rook as a ‘queen’, and ‘rooks’ and ‘bishops’ which have each other's move but backwards — albeit this being Charles Gilman, the pieces all have ifferent names. This one had quite a positive reception, and it does preserve some aspects of square‐cell chess that other analogies lack (some of which are touched on in its comments) — it's certainly worth a look


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