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I was trying to view chess (and chess variants) through the eyes of wargames, using wargame terminology, rather than create a hybrid game.
I suspect that the chess/wargame hybrids will be as varied as all the rest of our CVs. I've been working on military chess variants for a couple years, and I abstracted a completely different list of things to put into a hybrid. And without the help of Carlos, David, Gary, Jeremy, Larry, Uri and others whom I'm sure I'm forgetting right now*, the rest of you would be spared all this. I'm grateful. Your mileage may vary. *added 1 name The first obvious difference between wargames and chess variants is the size; wargames are roughly an order of magnitude larger, in both board and pieces, than chess variants. Wargames are also richer in features than variants, leaders and terrain being 2. In general, combat units are much slower than chesspieces; a wargame unit generally moves only a small fraction of board length as a maximum movement. And in wargames, a significant fraction of an army is usually moved each turn, if not every unit. How to merge the two? And, incidentally, control the chaos of very large multi-move chess games? [It was obvious a military sort of CV would pretty much have to be a multi-move game.] Leaders were a very good way to get a handle on most of the problems of large [some would say too large] wargame-type CVs, so I replaced 1 king with several leaders. Now, a piece can't move until a leader 'tells' it to. Coupled with short range pieces, leaders able to give orders only to pieces they were near produced a very nice um, medium-sized [to me anyway] 12x16 game, Chieftain Chess [which by the way, is actually a shatranj variant - it came directly from Lemurian Shatranj]. http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSchieftainchess Chief starts with 8 clans having just arrived at the edges of a large field to do battle, 4 against 4. The players deploy the 2 armies and move across the field, maneuvering to gain advantage in one area of the board or another. Capture is the traditional FIDE capture by replacement - pieces move onto enemy squares, and stop, removing the enemy pieces. All pieces are clearly chesslike. But the character of the game has changed a bit: instead of attacking 'through time', players attack 'across space'. A typical chess game involves many attacks in a few areas that are carried on, and calculated, across many turns. A Chieftain game features many attacks across the entire board each turn, and these attacks generally last only a few turns in time before the battle has swept away from that area to someplace new. This is closer to a wargame, but there are 'flaws' in this chess simulation of a wargame. By the end of the game, both armies are utterly destroyed, with the winning player having between 2 and 6 pieces left, and the loser, nothing. The game is also very unforgiving; get a single piece down early, and that can easily cost you the game at the end. Now, this is not a bad thing for chess. In fact, I suspect most good players would appreciate knowing a game like this is all pure skill. Still, a wargame features a little more flexibility. In Chief, losing 1 leader without getting one of your opponent's means you will lose the game quickly, 'every' time. [Like blundering away your queen for nothing.] This is not a feature of most battles. [But it is, fortunately, very much a feature of a good chess game. For what it's worth, I can recommend Chieftain Chess as a very nice and very different chess variant.] This is already overlong, and there's more I'd like to say [you have been warned!] so I'll continue with things that have and haven't worked, or haven't worked yet, in another post.
Rich. In the yahoo group, there is a very funny text that compares chess as a brand new war game, Ibelive that somoe of your questions are in there. Others can be developed here. With this text in mind, I've been thinking about a wargame variant, in a huge board. Take a look at it. Hugs!
Right. Goddesschess, one of my 3 favourite chess websites, http://www.goddesschess.com has a contrary view of Chess as game of goddess, based on subversion of that tradition that engined humanity for 100,000 years. However, I tend to view chess as in fact war sublimated from the very beginning of CVPage with this work, http://www.chessvariants.org/fiction.dir/poems/falcon.html. Here there are ''war-words,'' ''swords'' and ''halcyon stand-off'' in fear of war, and ''Sport'' which is also civilized war, and ''rituals of place and power'' for war and politics. Let's take them one by one, the categories, first with Terrain. Terrain has three components, Earth, Water, and Air. Atmosphere, physicists point out, is not ''up there'' but down here on account of gravity. So it's all-terrain all-out war through three media at least. ''Magnificent. Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.'' --General George Patton http://www.military-quotes.com/Patton.htm
George, those games look interesting. What I am trying to do here though, is view chess through the eyes of a wargame, not adopt a particular war or era of war to chess. Idea is to see if Chess could become something like ASL or a wargame system with scenarios, rather than locking down tanks and whatnot as if they were part of a static game like chess. So, to this end, I am interested in having the categories I laid out, critiqued and expanded upon.
These two are chess war-games on the footsteps of WWII, Chess-Battle and Novo Chess. http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/chessbattle.html http://www.chessvariants.org/wargame.dir/novo/novo.html
Chess is said to be war abstracted, and a wargame of sort. To this end, I figured I would look at what is involved war (and chess variants) and see how they equate. Please look over this, discuss and debate. I will look to post here and/or edit, if I see any more changes. Ok, onto the elements, and how they map to chess: * Terrain: The Board, or pawns in FIDE chess. This marks what is fought over. Pawns act as walls in FIDE chess, and protect the king. * Units: Pieces. * Air Units: Leapers. * Transport Units: Pawns that promote to other pieces can be seen as this. Castling is a very abstract form of transporting. Gating could also be seen as matching this. * Artillery: Units that capture enemy units without moving. * Support: A piece that defends a friendly piece on the board. * Reserves: Pocket pieces, or possibly what Pawns promote to. * Weather: If you were to play with mutators for a chess game, that would seem like weather to me. A variable set of rules that may or may not appear in a game. * Formation: The starting positions for pieces. * Suppression: Pinning a piece. * Generals/Commander: Players * Headquarters: Chess King (Royal pieces) * Morale: Emotional states of players. * Scenario: A game variant (a set combination of all the above). Please comment, critique or add your own ideas.
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