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Penturanga. Chaturanga on a board with 46 pentagonal cells. (8x5, Cells: 46) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]This looks really cool. I was wondering when someone would be inventive enough to create a chess game on a pentagonal board. Congratulations on being that person!
Having analysed this variant thoroughly I have been torn between the ratings Good and Average. In the end I plumped for Good as it does seem a good game, but mostly by accident and despite the presentation. Sorry if this seems faint praise. The first thing to notice is that that 'pentagons' are really hexagons with one corner flattened. Where a cell is surrounded it is by 6, not 5, others. The board as a whole resolves itself into a hex board of Glinsky/McCooey orientation, irregular in shape but symmetric about a midline. The number of cells per file are, from left to right: 1, 6, 7, 8, 7, 8, 7, 2. This of course has an impact on the pieces. The Pawn analogue is the same as Glinsky's. The Elephant analogue is bound to 1 in 3 cells, but the Knight analogue to still less, 1 in 4, being in fact a Dabbaba. This is the reverse of the analogy in my own variant Hex Dabbaba Qi! Each player has a Dabbaba bound to each of the two bindings forming together the files with even numbers of cells - binding all to identical numbers of cells. Yet there is no mention of this feature on the page! On the whole this is a good version of Chaturanga, but a good hexagonal rather than pentagonal one. It inspires me to wonder whether I can do one as good on a more regular-shaped board (a Chaturanga counterpart to HDQ) - and also to how pieces would move on a board of genuine pentagons.
Or are all the hexagonal variants ''funny-looking'' pentagonal ones? Ralph Betza's Rectahex Chess (2003) concludes ''Hexagonal Chess can be played quite simply on normal rectangular board.'' Betza's resolving hex dynamics there worsens visualization, but Rectahex is excellent for Betza's satiric, clever transformation. This Penturanga marginally improves ease of visualizing interpretatively-hex movements, in acceptable technique for claiming novelty at sophisticated stage as this, pursuant thousands of forms. Differently -- hey, there are hundreds hexagonal chesses, so why not a hundred pentagonal ones -- US Patent No. 4357018 [Go to USPTO 'Number Search'] 02.Nov.1982 to Murray Calvert, of London, Ontario, Canada, has CV of ''interlocking chains of regular pentagons in side by side abutment,'' intended for play of Chess, Checkers and Dominoes. So, Charles Gilman's ''board of genuine pentagons'' has been done before. Another one US Patent No. 3981505 ''Irregular Pentagons'' 21.Sept.1976 to Marc Odier, Paris, France, is more puzzle-mechanism device than actual CV. It improves on Odier's prior USP3608906 28.Sept.1971 and France Patent No. 1582023. Another one 14.August.1883 (125 years back) USPatent 282990 to Percy Johnson, Marlborough, Mass., USA, also has chess embodiment played on pentagonal spaces. Chess Variant Page also linked a Pentagonal chess several years ago I cannot find right away. What goes around comes around.
Well done Graeme! I like this layout. One suggestion I'd make is to expand the board, however. The size is ideal for the short-range pieces, but the rook would love some long runways to run on. I'm impressed by the way you've been able to design a pentagonal board; I've tried that myself, but couldn't come up with a model that satisfied me completely. But you've done it - congratulations.
I like this game very much, but I would not have limited the pawn promotion so much had I created it. The first thing I would do if I were transliterating Chaturanga/Shatranj to a quasi-pentagonal board would be to keep the basic pawn promotion rule from the original game intact instead of discarding it altogether and then add the piece that starts on or directly in front of that cell to the promotion options. In the event that a Pawn landed where the opponent's Adviser/Counselor started, it would be able to promote to any piece other than the king. That gripe aside, the game is a very good quasi-pentagonal version of chess. However, there is no rating between Good and Excellent and I could not really give an Excellent rating the game is not completely faithful to its historical original with regards to Pawn promotion. P.S. I am referring to the board as quasi-pentagonal because a true pentagonal board is a tessellation of pentagons that does not involve pushing small groups of them together into shapes other than pentagons and I did not call it hexagonal as that would imply that it was nothing more than a hexagonal grid.
This game is great. I have 2 complaints, however. 1 is that there is a bias for the medium tan for the Elephant's boundness. Perhaps you could change the setup and have 3 Elephants per side. 2 is that the board is too cramped, just as in your other game, Step and Circle Trig Chess.
I love it when people break the mold and come up with an alternate tessellation for a chess variant (such as Parachess).
Speaking of which, is there any interest in my inventing a variant using an alternate tessellation. I have an idea that has been bouncing around my head for over a decade which I should make a variant out of, but only if people would be interested in looking at it.
- Sam
Actually, representation is everything. For example, look at my game 'Square and hex on same board' - http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSsquareandhexon or at this (zzo38) A. Black's comment about 1-dimensional games - http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=25177 But i'm going to post another petagonal variant now, wich is more different from hexagonal variants, each 'square' have 5 orthogonally-adjecent 'squares'.
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