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Well, if you like the large number of setups, here's another idea you may find amusing: Googol Chess. In Googol Chess, each square points to a particular non-adjacent square randomly chosen during the setup. A piece has the additional power to leap to the square pointed to by its current square, if that destination square is empty. There are at least (64-9)^64=55^64 > 2.1 x 10^111 possible setups on a standard chessboard.
I like this idea because I like the idea of having a chess variant template which makes for a huge number of playable games; I'm not just talking about the 960 games of Fischer Random Chess or the 252,000 possible games using a 8x10 Carrera setup where the bishops are on opposite colors; I'm talking a Chess variant that allows a number of games with a number like 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 (the number of possible Sudoku solutions).
One idea: Each pawn can be one of nine different pawn types:
For the pieces, any of the pieces, except the king, can have any of the 15 combinations of rook, knight, bishop, and camel movements. The king exists in three forms: Can move as a ferz, can move as a wazir, and can move as a FIDE chess king. For an 8 * 8 board, this results in 512,578,125 possible setups; combine this with the pawns above and our 8x8 board now has 22,064,807,537,578,125 possible opening setups. The corresponding 8x10/10x10 board has 402,131,117,372,361,328,125 possible opening setups. Now we're starting to get what looks like a variant template with a decent number of possible starting setups. :) As a practical matter, this template for the pieces probably usually results in arrays where white has a considerable advantage because there is so much force on the board, but this is a thought experiment, not a practical Chess variant design. This might work a little better: Make the atoms Betza's crab (leaps from e4 to d6, f6, c3, and g3), a fers, a wazir, and a camel. But that probably makes most setups too weak. Perhaps if we add a randomizing factor with these weak atoms whick randomly strengthens one of the atoms (makes the ferz atom a bishop atom, a wazir a rook, a crab a knight, and a camel a camel + dabbah). This causes each piece to have one of 32 possible forms; for an 8x8 board this results in a grand total of 4,437,222,213,480,873,984 possible setups; for a 10x8 or 10x10 board, this results in 368,040,959,274,957,611,728,896 possible setups. |
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1-player
2-player
- Sudoku Chess (rules)
- Sudoku War (rules, ZRF)
- Smythe Dakota's Sudoku Chess (rules)
Hints to other chess sudoku crossover are welcome.