Rated Comments for a Single Item
A promising game that might be worthy of upgrade to Excellent pending play-testing, which I will now try with Jose's new preset.
Reading through the comments, the promotion rules seem to provoke the most disagreement. I must admit that I don't like the promotion rules as written. I can see both promotion only to general, or promotion to general or to any lost piece as reasonable options, both leading to good although different games. For myself, the part I find troubling is this:
At most, only 3 lost pieces may be regained: 1 rook, 1 knight, and 1 elephant, even if the player has lost both of any type.
The problem with this is that it is no longer possible to look at a board and know what moves are legal. You'd have to also know about all past promotions. This makes the game much more difficult to program. Chess has this issue too with castling - you have to know which rooks/kings have moved, although when the game has progressed enough that these pieces are no longer on their original squares it becomes a non-issue. Also, Chess has established standards for how the castling information is preserved in the FEN game notation. If we wanted to notate positions of Modern Shatranj with FEN notation, (certainly a worthy goal), new notation standards would need to be invented. I would question whether the value of this particular rule justifies the significant added complexity.
Joe,
I find this Shatranj variant very interesting.
I created preset which enforces the rules:
/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DModern+Shatranj%26settings%3Dcarrillo
The only difference in my implementation of the rules is that Pawns can only promote to Generals (to keep more of a 'shatranj-ness' flavour).
I'm one of the few 0.01% (or less) who arrived here not knowing modern orthodox chess previously. In fact, I never played chess, and my interest on the subject was just recently ignited by a friend who is a chess enthusiast. I began searching for the basics, the rules, the pieces, their moves, etc., and I was quickly drawn to the historical origins and developments of the game(s). From there to the modern variants it was a quick step. I can tell you that, from a neophyte point of view, Chaturanga and Shatranj are easier to understand, but their weaknesses are evident. Modern chess, on the other side -- or "madwoman chess", as it was pejoratively called by conservative players five centuries ago, when the queen became a bishop-rook --, though more agile and powerfull, is more difficult for beginners to grasp. It appears to me that one needs to be always conscious of the disposition of every pieces on the board, even the ones distant to the piece one intends to move next, simply because, at any moment, a queen or a bishop or a rook can come across from the other side of the board and totally wrecks one's intended strategy. Using the war analogies in which the games were originally inspired, the wide movements of modern pieces are like missiles, whereas the ancient battles modelled by Chaturanga and Shatranj were fought body to body -- except for the archers. (And isn't weird the absence of "archers" among the Chaturanga/Shatranj pieces?). The most mobile subsets of any army in Antiquity were the (mounted) cavalry and the chariots (dragged by horses). So, it is logical that the most mobile pieces on Chaturanga/Shatranj were the "horses" (knights) and the "chariots" (rooks). But even the wide range movements of the rooks, crossing several squares at once (potentially an entire row), as recorded in (or infered by) the oldest known historical Shatranj descriptions, probably were already an early improvement in the game. It's not reasonable to suppose that any piece in the game was originally more far-reaching than the horse/knight. I think the greateast virtue of the Modern Shatranj -- specially the "D" version, with one dabbabah-wazir in the place of the traditional rook -- is to restore (and put a limit to) the short-range movements of the pieces, according to the metaphore that inspired the original game. There was nothing or nobody in any army that could cross an entire battlefield at once in Antiquity, hence no piece should be able to cross the entire board in Chaturanga/Shatranj in one move. Thus, the player doesn't need to worry with distant pieces in the board, because only the ones close to the piece he intends to moved can pose an immediate threat to it. The other great virtue of Modern Shatranj is that, by augmenting the mobility of the counselor/general and the elephants (but without expanding too much their reach), it not only turns these pieces more "powerfull", but it also introduces a beautifull *simetry* to the overall dynamics of the game -- and here, again, the "D" version is superior to the "R" version. Now each "army" on the "battlefield" has: - two elements that can move only one square orthogonally or diagonally, the king and the general; - two elements that can move one or jump two squares diagonally, the elephants; - two elements that can move one or jump two squares orthogonally, the chariots; - two elements that can jump three squares "orthodiagonally", the horses. We can easy visualize this perfect simmetry by picturing the movement diagrams of these four kinds of pieces superimposed: if it were possible to put all four pieces in one same square, this would be the center of a set with 4x4 squares, and each one of these 16 squares would be reachable via a single movement of at least one of the four pieces put in the center! That would not be any "falted" square, one that could not be reached by at least one kind of piece put in the center of any 4x4 set of squares. This doesn't happen in the original Shatranj game. Thus, the Modern Shatranj D allow the players to charge *full power* in the "battle front" of the game, not worrying about any "missile" coming from beyond the horizon. It seems to be the perfect balance between mobility and elegance, dynamics and aesthetics, power and race in a Shatranj-like game!
Shatranj Kamil (64) is my recent attempt at providing a comprehensive set of rules for Shatranj variants.
Consider the endgame position White: King (c1), Knight (a6) Black: King (a1), Pawn (a3). White can force checkmate with 1.Nb4 a2 2.Nc2, or stalemate with 2.Kc2.
If White choses to play 2.Na6 instead, then, under the variant rule that Pritchard cites, the Black king can escape stalemate by transposing with the Black Pawn. Question: under the rules of Nilakantha's Intellectual Game (web page by John Ayer) can Black 'slay the piece of the enemy in his vicinity which imprisons him'? That piece is the White King!
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I'd tentatively estimate the relative piece values in Modern Shatranj (current version) as: Pawn=1, Knight=3.5, Rook=5.5, King's fighting value (noting it cannot be traded)=4, General=4 (noting it can be traded or put what be 'in check', unlike a K, but I've judged their value in action to be similar enough), with the Elephant=3.125.