Rated Comments for a Single Item

Wow!!  

Who said theme doesn't count in abstract games?  I want to play this, but I
think I'm going to be disapointed when the pieces remain silent.  I want to
see a ZRF, but not too soon.  Whoever does it needs to do a good job on the
graphics, not to mention audio, to do the game justice.

'What eldritch noise did I hear?'  Perhaps the screech of the El.

Question: can a wounded friend move over (but obviously not stop on) a
square occupied by a mummy?  i am not sure.

if anybody wants to try this game with me by email, send to
[email protected]

Well, I wanted to relive this game! let's see if I can manage to do it.

Has anyone tested it and can give the results? I'd also like to repeat
some early analysis I made but I made a typo on it, rendering it invalid.

*Case 1. Alabaster Human d3; Obsidian Ghast e4.
d3 is compelled to move. Out of his usually available five moves, only two
of them actually flee the Ghast. They are Hc3 or Hc4. This human is still
compelled to flee to the b file on the next move.

*Case 2. Alabaster Human d3, Ghast b3, Go Away e2; Obsidian Ghast e4.
now the human moves to the c files are illegal, since he would be
approaching his own Ghast. But there's a saving move: Ae2 [reminder: on my
notation, a Go Away scream is recorded as moving to his own square]. The
scream pushes the Human to c4. The Human is still compelled, but now Hb5
(fleeing both Ghasts) is legal.

*Case 3. Alabaster Go Away a2, Human a3; Obsidian Ghast d4; Ichor on a3
and a4.
Now it gets tricky. Is screaming legal? [My thought: It was compelled to
move off of an ichorous square, and he did so. He is now compelled to move
off of a *different* Ichorous square.] Well, Is it valid?

*Case 4. Alabaster Go Away a2, Human a3; Obsidian Ghast d4; Mummy a3.
Well, This is even trickier. Now the Human can go to a4 on his own, but is
screaming valid? [Rationale: I think it should be to be consistent with
case 3, ie this is another multiple occupancy square.]

And now for something completely different. My thoughts on the pieces.

Basilisk: This is powerful, but using his ability also reduces his
mobility.  So it needs to be careful to not to petrify many pieces at once
or it can get in trouble. Grade: B

Ghast: The compelling thing is great, This piece can be deadly if placed
correctly. There is a nice balancing act, though. This piece is
thrice-colorbound. But it seems hard to stop nonetheless. Grade: B+

Go Away: This is a killer. Albeit colorbound, this piece can create lots
of trouble. If you push your opponent's Go Away orthogonally, he has now
both Go Aways on the same color. Severe Balancing Act: It's the only piece
that stops working when petrified. A petrified Go Away could as well be a
petrified Human. Still... Grade: A

Leaf Pile: Simple and Deadly. But it's slow. Still, be careful of where
your opponent places his Leaf Piles. Grade: A-

Wounded Fiend: Being a rider is such a disadvantage in this game. No, he
can't run through a Ghast range to the other side, he can't cross a
basilisk gaze... But he can block squares for a limited time... (If we put
the poor Alabaster Human of the cases before on d3, and the Obsidian Ghast
at e4, but now we add an Obsidian Wounded Fiend at b5, after 1. Hc3(4)
1... Wb2++ wins by stalemating the Human, trapped in between ichor and a
Ghast.) Grade: C+

Human: No wonder there are so many, otherwise you blink and you miss them:
This poor guys have no power and suffer all sort of troubles. You can make
Zombies out of them, but that's so hard... Grade: D

Zombie: Now this guy has power! If he can keep away from Ichor, they are
quite a force to reckon with. Grade: A+

Statues: Several kind of statues, and (almost) all of them still useful in
a way or another. Still they are immobile... Grade: no way I can give a
single grade, they're so different.

Mummy: OK, an immobile piece with no power whatsoever, and if you want to
use them to block it will need lots of strategy. This is a no-brainer.
Grade: F

Disclaimer: I haven't played Nemoroth, so all this is out of thinking, not
actual experience.

Finally, I'd like to ask who of you asked for the wrong furniture...

-- 

Moussambani, who never has been in Mine's End and never completed Sokoban.
The Quest? Maybe some year in the 2030s...

One question about ichorous squares.  In the discussion of ichorous
squares, it states:

'If pushed onto an ichorous square, a mobile piece other than Zombie is
compelled to move off. Exception: if the ichor will evaporate after you
make your move but before your opponent moves, you can ignore it.'

Does this mean:
a) a piece on a ichorous square, where the last bit of ichor will
evaporate immediately following the player's move, is not compelled to
move?  OR
b) a piece on a ichorous square, where the last bit of ichor will
evaporate immediately following the player's move, is compelled to move,
but the evaporation of the last bit of ichor constitutes a saving move?

It makes a difference if the player has another piece is compelled for
some other reason.  If (a) is the case, he must move the other piece, or
make a saving move for the compulsion on that other piece, since that is
his only compulsion.  If (b), he can make any legal move, since the
evaporation of the ichor is a saving move for an existing compulsion.

Anyway, just a couple of questions that came to my mind while reading the rules for the 10th time (I probably know them by hard now, I just love reading them =P):

1) Suppose we've got a mummy and a statue in the same square (possible, thanks to the marbelous deeds of a Go Away/Banshee/Dread), now if pushed once more, they'll travel toghether, right? (i guess the same would happen with any combinations of contents being pushed as a matter of fact).

2) Well, that was pretty silly, but how about this one: suppose there's a Leaf Pile engulfing them (or whatever else you care for it to engulf) and a Go Away/Banshee/Dread pushes, will the engulfed piece be pushed as well? or is it just the Leaf Pile that gets pushed leaving behind the engulfed pieces unharmed?

3) Now that I'm at it, about engulfing, by it you mean that the 'engulfed' pieces cannot move, right? It's kind of logical since they are 'removed' from the board and only the Leaf Pile remains.

4) Any ideas as to how many different statues could there be? I mean, a petrified Go Away/Banshee/Dread is pretty much like a petrified Human for that matter (I think I read a comment addressing the same issue).

5) Any ideas as for how many pieces (maximun amount) can there be in a single position? Something like an Upper bound...?

OK, that's pretty much it, great game!

cheers!

A question?

Can a go away push pieces off the board? If not what would happen if a go
away on g8 used it's special move on a piece on h8?

Raplh Betza posted this game after I stopped haunting the Chess Variant
Pages around 2000, and so I didn't become aware of it until recently. And
having become aware of it, I am (like some of the previous posters)
intrigued by the extreme challenge (apparently yet unmet) of writing a ZRF
for it.

In response to Robert Price's post of 2004-01-17, it seems to me that the
nonsimultaneous shout of the Go Away is actually a more interesting problem
than multiple occupancy. As far as I know, Mr. Price's proposal to treat
this as a 3-dimensional game with visually overlapping cells is, although
a pain to code, the appropriate solution for Zillions. However, I believe
it is infeasible to code a Go Away shout as a single Zillions move. As Mr.
Price implies, using add-partial to code a shout as a series of all legal
submoves is likely to result in a very weak computer opponent, because
Zillions will be able to look ahead only a very short distance when a
complicated shout is available. Nonetheless, I think you have to do just
that.

The reason why the shout is so troublesome is that in the worst case, a Go
Away can be surrounded by a large number of pieces, including both
Basilisks. As I understand it, the order in which a Go Away pushes pieces
does not matter unless it pushes Basilisks; but if does push Basilisks,
then it matters which pieces are pushed before and which after each
Basilisk.

That means that when a Go Away is surrounding by n non-Basilisk pieces
subject to petrification (that is, n pieces that are not Basilisks, and
not statues or otherwise immune to the Basilisk's glare), the number of
distinct moves a Go Away can make is equal to the number of ways to
partition a set into b + 1 parts, where b is the number of Basilisks among
the n pieces.

For a large n (say, 8 or so, but multiple occupancy can result in an even
larger n than 8), this is a big enough number for one Basilisk (256 for n
= 8), and an even bigger one for two (6561 for n = 8). Certainly the
number could be big enough that the menu of move choices Zillions would
display for a single-move Go Away shout would be substantially larger than
the average computer screen. I know such menus are broken into multiple
columns when longer than the height of  the screen, but a big shout could
easily fill the entire width of the screen with such columns, and still
not be done. What happens then? I've never seen a program display such a
long list of choices, but my experience with Microsoft products leads to
me fear that Windows does not handle the situation gracefully.

However, I think there is a solution involving add-partial that is near
optimal. Code it as follows: first move all the non-Basilisk
petrification-immune pieces simultaneously, and then move each of the
remaining pieces in a partial move. I think the result in terms of
lookahead difficulty is the same for Zillions as for a single-move shout,
but the menus should be manageable for a human player.

If someone who understands the implications of the rules of Nemoroth
better than I do figures out that there is actually a tight enough
constraint on the number of nonpetrifiable pieces that can be adjacent to
a Go Away that the unitary Go Away move actually is feasible, I'd welcome
the news.

In any case, Nemoroth is an extremely deep game, much more so than any
other pure strategy game I know of, and computers are likely to play it
very badly for the foreseeable future.

An alternative to implementing the full rules might be to nerf the Go
Away, and code its shout as simultaneous (move all the pieces first, and
only then calculate the Basilisks' effects). This would not really be
Nemoroth, of course; it would be a less deep variant (you might call it
Nemoroth Lite), but computers might play it better.

As an aside, I'm grateful for John Lawson's comment of 2008-10-30, where
he says it's difficult to play Nemoroth legally. When I first read the
rules, I thought, there's no way I'd be able to figure out what was a
legal move in this game without a computer to help me. I'm glad it's not
just my own thickheadedness.

While re-visiting the comments for this game, I realized that I had not given it a rating. So now I correct that oversight.

I've finally accepted that this game will be extremely difficult to code. So for the sake of my own sanity I have given up such an attempt. But it has been fun trying. Like hitting myself with a hammer. :)

This is not to say that it will not eventually be coded. I just realize that it will probably need its own dedicated program to accomplish this. And such a project will be merely a labor of love(or obsession) because there will probably never be sufficient monetary reward to cover this effort.

If anyone decides to make such an attempt, they have my sympathy. ;-)

Instead of 'Multiple Occupancy', why not use 'Crowdness' to indicate
the status of multiple pieces on the same square? That sounds better and
easier.

Also I think, if one wants to rewrite the rule for readability, what he
needs is to modify the order to introduce the pieces and statuses.


For example:

1. Humans, starting at the normal pawn squares, moves 1 square without
capture in 5 directions, namely 1 forward one, 2 diagonally forward ones,
and 2 sideways ones. Upon arriving at the 8th rank promotes to Zombies,
which are very strong. Just remember the name for now.

2. Go Aways, starting at the normal bishop squares, jumps 2 rookwise or
moves 1 diagonally. Instead of moving, may scream, which push adjacent
things away. Pushing things onto non-empty squares results in crowded ones.
Living things that find themselves in a crowd are compelled to move out.

Compulsions: the status in which ...


Just like that. I don't have time to write a full version, just want
anyone else to do it.

'Mobile pieces within the range of an allied Ghast are not compelled to
move, but when they do move they must flee.'

Wait...does the Go Away's scream count as a movement? If a Go Away is on a
square in the range of a friendly Ghast, is it permitted to scream?

I assume that the answer is 'yes,' since the example game includes a
portion in which an Alabaster Go Away screams while adjacent to an
Alabaster Ghast.

(I'm interested in clarifying all these rules, since I'm trying to code
this game in time for Halloween.)

I may already be sufficiently insane to read this. I prefer using flat pieces that won't scream and whatever, but I don't mind if it has to do the other way, since that is OK, too. It is complicated, but it seems well enough to work. Some things are not entirely clear; the document should really be improved to clarify the rules more.

Now make the variant which is mostly this game but can also use a hand of cards (drawn from a shuffled deck and hidden from opponent, and used for a few additional special actions by playing combinations properly, including to affect opponent's cards), betting, scoring, and other things. (And if you are in a manga written by Fukumoto, even betting your fingers and your blood and billions of yen, and cheating in extreme ways, and the use of double and triple bluffs and so on.)

What a game!

I didn't know that it is possible to create a game using pieces that are credibly EVIL. That's not just a game, it's a piece of art.

I'm not convinced though, that it is playable "by mere mortals" without minor changes. The most problematic piece is the Ghast. It's presence restricts the possible opening play for the second player to a few playable variations.

If you happen to hear strange voices when trying this game, don't bother! Thats normal...

Traditional for Halloween October.