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Fergus Duniho illustrates the 12 directions of movement on a hexagon board and inteprets them for Shogi pieces on his Hex Shogi page. In Hex Shogi 81 he copies the traditional Shogi setup to a 'tilted rectangle' made up of 81 hexagons. A few weeks ago I was looking at Duniho's game and thinking that it could be also played on a square board, with a little mathematical magic.
It should be possible to use Ralph Betza's work to accomplish this task. Start with a traditional Shogi board and pieces. Replace the Rooks with 'Rectahex Rooks' and the Bishops with 'Rectahex Bishops'. Looks like the Shogi Knight can be replaced by a Rectahex Knight, restricted to four forward Bison moves. In the final analysis, pieces are completely defined by their movement rules - the geometry of the board is merely a convenient aid to play. But I am not seriously recommending that anyone try to play a game of Rectahex Shogi 81.
I like this game !! I have an observation. If we merge the board rotated to the right with the board rotated to the left, We get Queens for Rooks, Unicorns (BNN) for Bishops, and NJZ (Knight + Camel + Zebra) for Knights, Queen of the Night (BRNN) for Queen. Sounds like a nice variant. If we subtract the original pieces movements from Rooks, Knight, and Bishops, we get Bishops for Rooks, Bisons for Knights, Nightriders for Bishops, and Unicorn for Queen. This makes a nice CwDA army. Don't you think ? I will post this into a new page, since it is a very different variant.
For the sake of argument, I'll take the opposing point of view. :) 'Hexagonal Chess can be played quite simply on a normal rectangular board' is a statement not justified by the article. First the player is expected to either rotate a board 45 degrees and remember that corners are now edges and vice versa, or they need to memorize a new army unusual-moving pieces. For the author of the article these may be simple tasks, but I would venture to say that for the casual CV player it is difficult. The author even implies this himself when describing the moves of the pieces: 'This is confusing' and 'This is a cumbersome piece' are used, and the 'normal' description of how the pieces move are complex. The advantage of playing with hex-moving pieces on a readily available rectangular board is outweighed by the complexities of 'biasing' the board to match the connections of a hexagonal one. It would be to a player's advantage to buy an inexpensive set of poker chips and arrange them as a hexagon and use the 'standard' hexchess pieces. The article is useful, in that it shows how one type of board and pieces can be mapped to another type. It can provide the starting point for further hex/rect explorations, and possible new pieces for the rectangular board. 'Biased' pieces as described in the article are vaguely reminiscent of left- and right-handed pieces in shogi variants. The rectahex knight could be matched with a mirrored one to make a pair of 'ufos' on a large-board variant. Thanks for the article!
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