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Leaping/Missing Bat Chess. Large variant on a 16x12 board with many fairy pieces. (16x12, Cells: 192) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Oct 13, 2022 10:46 AM UTC:

This is a large game featuring all 'elemental' fairy pieces. The weird ones are Rhino (a circular K-rider), Griffin (which on the first two squares of its path can only capture), Tiger and Walker (divergent compounds of B/N and W/F).

And to make some of the previous discussion clear: I did not want to imply this game would take an extrodinary large number of moves. I was just wondering what the use of a '500-move rule' would be. Such rules are meant to force a stubborn player, who doesn't want to admit he can no longer win, to prove his point by making progress in a reasonable time. But 500 moves doesn't seem reasonable. Would there be any practical example of a position that would take more than 400 irreversible moves to win?


George Duke wrote on Fri, Sep 23, 2016 08:07 PM UTC:Good ★★★★

Savard is mathematician and this is satire too a little overdone.  I mean Bat as root-65 leaper?

Can the Bat reach more than the 16 squares shown in the diagram of the 12x16 board? If so how many squares are ultimately reachable by Bat?

Besides the Bishops and the Bats, what other (several) piece-types are unable to reach all 192 squares and how many can they reach given the set-up array?


Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Fri, Mar 18, 2011 04:08 AM UTC:
Mats, i do not think this game should suffer from any type of exhaustion.
If two people sit down to play the game over the board, they do not have to play the game to the finish, it can played over a few sittings. I do think playing by email though would be best.

As far as mental exhaustion goes, due to the large amounts of different moves available that will arise during the game, this is not fide chess, it is a game on a very large board. One would have to use their intuition and feel for the game, you would have to disregard many moves that on appearance there would seem nothing wrong the move. There would be too many moves to analize, so you would have to do your best.
Would this add a greater element of luck in the game, i would say definitely yes, would this make the game unplayable, i would say definitely not.
I'm not sure what game people play on game courier that would be the closest to Leaping Bat, would it be Cataclysm?

Cataclysm plays on a 16x12 board with 16 pawns like Leaping Bat, but Cata has 24 pieces to LB's 32, so that is a fair difference, and the piece strength also in Cata is greater than LB, so this is probably not a great example, but still it must give us some indication i think.
Amazingly i have noticed that a couple of Cata games have been completed in under 80 moves, another seems to have gone to around 350, if memory serves me correct. Obviously, it appears that Cata is indeed playable.
In the interest of the study of big board games, if anyone knows another large board variant, at least 16x12 board, played on game courier, could you please post to say.

Charles Gilman wrote on Thu, Feb 24, 2011 07:02 AM UTC:
The words 'a fairly standard set' set me off wondering how easy it could be played with distinguishable FIDE sets. With 1 aside of 6 piece types, 2 aside of 11, and 4 and 16 aside of the remaining 2, 3 sets cannot do it, but 4 can. I began by assuming that 2 sets' Pawns would be ignored, but then realised that it would make sense to use half of one set's Pawns as Alfils. When I laid everything out I realised that the last set had only two piece types in use. This made me wonder whether I could substitute a more exotic set for the third and fourth. A Xiang Qi set would again not quite do it, as using only four Points aside would mean only 15 out of 16 pieces. A Shogi set, however, did the trick and I finally hit on the following representation:
	FIDE set 1 - all pieces as themselves.
	FIDE set 2 - King as Bat; Queen as Nightrider; Rooks as Tigers; Bishops as Camels; Knights as Giraffes; Pawns as Pawns.
	Shogi set - Rook as Gryphon; Bishop as Rhino; paired pieces as Wazirs, Ferzes, Men (aka Princes), and Walkers (aka Stewards); Points promoted as Dabbabas and unpromoted as Alfils.

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Tue, Feb 22, 2011 03:49 AM UTC:
Leaping Bat seems to play with a fairly standard set of fairy pieces. Is there anything in particular about this game that makes you estimate the amount of moves it could take to play as you have?

Or are you saying, that any game played on a 16x12 board, with a similar set-up to Leaping Bat, (full row of pawns and two full rows of pieces playing at either ends of the board with at least the same amount of one square movers and similar piece strength/variety) would take this long?

H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Feb 20, 2011 12:41 PM UTC:
If it becomes only clear after 500 moves that you cannot make even a tiny bit of progress, like simplfying or pushing a Pawn, and not after, say, 400 or 300 moves, the game must progress at excruciatingly slow pace. How many of these tiny bits of progress would you have to make to win? How many pieces have to be traded, how many pawns to be pushed? Multiply that by 300, and it seems a typical game will last between 10,000 and 100,000 moves...

M Winther wrote on Sun, Feb 20, 2011 12:12 PM UTC:
In practice it is unplayable because it is exhausting to play, and even to learn. Nor has it been proven that it even works. 
/Mats

Christine Bagley-Jones wrote on Sun, Feb 20, 2011 09:36 AM UTC:
why exactly do you say this game is 'unplayable'.

M Winther wrote on Sun, Feb 20, 2011 08:42 AM UTC:
> ... except that the 50-move rule is replaced by a 500-move rule, ... :-)))

Yes, it is such rules that makes one wonder if these types of inventions are
really only scornful attempts to make fun of variant enthusiasts.
/Mats

H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Feb 19, 2011 05:36 PM UTC:
> ... except that the 50-move rule is replaced by a 500-move rule, ...

:-)))

M Winther wrote on Sat, Feb 19, 2011 08:28 AM UTC:Poor ★
I don't get it. This is not playable, nor is it interesting. So why do people keep inventing these over-complicated variants? Nor does 'crooked' piece movement make any sense. This site is flooded with this type of variant, so the good variants, which are *playable*, and can have an impact in the future, gets drowned in all this muck. Such creations only serve to deter people from taking an interest in chess variants. If some of the chess hardliners want to make variant enthusiasts stand out as unrealistic fools, then they need only link to this type of variant. 
/Mats

Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Oct 8, 2009 08:13 PM UTC:
Thanks for the reference, George. Looked for games, found 1 that's on turn 1. It hasn't gotten a lot of action since it's been posted. It has its good points. For example, it's a short range game, having notably more short range pieces than 'infinite sliders'. Among its bad points: it has a whole bunch of short range leapers that are knight analogs. Aside from the knight [well, maybe including the knight], these pieces are all awkward to use, and as their ranges get more and more elongated, they get more and more awkward to use. Note the Bat of the game's title does not appear in the game being played, nor is it recommended to be used in standard play. In fact John Savard specifically states it should not be used, it is there for problems, not play. 

It appears to me this game was put together by a problemist more than a player. Six of his pieces per side are among the most useless around, alfils and dabbabahs. And they are carefully set up so one side's alfils oppose the other's dabbabahs. This is the problemist's mind at work, not a player's.

This is not a bad thing, except our discussion recently has been on playability, and in this game, you will be fighting your own pieces as much as your opponent's. That limits its appeal to the more cerebral types. And unless someone blunders, or conversely, is utterly brilliant for several turns, this will be a long game. Again, this is a matter of taste, but it limits the game's appeal even more. 

Me, I don't like difficult pieces; the simpler the better. But I have no objection whatsoever to long games. I don't actually like games that are really short. I figure games should probably fall into the 30 - 100 or so moves range and this would give reasonable time limits for the possibility of good chess games. Too much shorter and you are losing strategic depth. Too much longer and you could probably cut the game down in size profitably. 

One last point. These games are at a size where it makes sense to look for something in addition to the standard mechanics of chess just to handle all the pieces and play a game in a reasonable amount of time.

George Duke wrote on Thu, Oct 8, 2009 01:22 AM UTC:
Joe, here's a 192 with a proper 19 piece-types by a mathematician. The nineteen of John Savard is certainly not by accident. It's because 19 = 10% 192. And the same business of 48+48=96, 50% density.

George Duke wrote on Fri, Sep 18, 2009 01:03 AM UTC:
Mathematician John Savard, who made Leaping/Missing Bat Chess, has two of his many chess pages outside on hexagonal forms. The link is now in the last comment here 20.September.2008 through ''all comments.'' One of his own invention on the second of the two pages about hexagonal geometry, Savard says, ''I was going to call the game Chinese Chess.''

George Duke wrote on Sat, Sep 20, 2008 04:32 PM UTC:
2001 12x16 by mathematician John Savard. The best-explained Internet proof of equation e^(pi*i)+1=0 is at Savard's homepage, where is Leaping/Missing Bat Chess. The website also has pentagonal tilings. And hexagonal history and examples: hexagonal

George Duke wrote on Fri, Feb 1, 2008 07:10 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Something important actually ramifies back to Chess Variant Page. When I put ''e to the (pi,i) equals minus one/ Like to the four Rook Bishop Knight Falcon'' in Falcon Poem XX 'Pleiadic Diacaustic' a year ago, we did Google search to double check its forms. Entering ''e pi i minus one'' leads to mathematician John Savard's Homepage for the best and major Internet exposition of Euler's famous equation. The same website's 'Chess' section there led back to this CVPage by way of Leaping/Missing Bat Chess. In L/M Bat, Bat itself, 64 + 1 = 49 + 16, gives the Root 65 Leaper here in 2001, before Gilman defines other root-leapers after 2003. In Gilmanese, Bat is Ibis(2,9) plus Ibex(5,8). The trouble with Bat and 16x12 (=192) is that while Bat can work its way to any of the squares, its direction is always forward then backward on successive moves. Plural-path(two-) Rhinoceros is not Betza's Rhino, but related to it and Betza's Rose at the same time. Rhinoceros' full eight steps is type of Null move(blockable case), and potentially a self-unpin, as Savard says, according to position (check by Rook, Bishop, Queen).

Jeremy Good wrote on Fri, Jun 1, 2007 10:26 AM UTC:
Excellent work.

Abdul-Rahman Sibahi wrote on Fri, Jun 1, 2007 12:10 AM UTC:
I have created a preset for this game. But I don't particularly like it so I won't post it in a separate page.

Link : /play/pbm/play.php?game%3DMissing+Bat+Chess%26settings%3Ddefault

This uses the Zebra variant.

David Paulowich wrote on Sun, Mar 20, 2005 05:15 PM UTC:
Great Shatranj (8x8 board) <p>rnaaaanr/ppdfkdpp/2pppp2/8/8/2PPPP2/PPDFKDPP/RNAAAANR/ <p>where A=Alfil and D=Dabbabba, illustrates John Savard's innovative ideas on how to cover the entire board with these two pieces. As George William Duke would say, best not to spoil this 'big little game' by playing it. I happen to be working on another chess variant with this Pawn structure (a cross between Shatranj and Makruk). <p>Consider removing a dozen weak pieces (4xAlfil, 2xFers, 2xWazir, 4xPawn) from each army in Leaping/Missing Bat Chess and replacing the 2xDabbabba with 2xAlibaba, allowing us to fit the new game on a 12x12 board. NOTE: Fergus Duniho uses both the Alibaba and the Walker (calling them Spider and Steward) in his Interdependent Chess.

George Duke wrote on Tue, Mar 15, 2005 10:47 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
'JKL,LargeCV': This is whimsical and the spirit is there. 19 piece-types over 192 squares is the recurrent 10 percent showing good instinct. Nice logos represent slew of animal(fellow sentient beings) pieces. Tiger is Bishop-mover, Knight-capturer, as in Divergent Chess. Two newly-invented pieces are Bat and Rhinoceros. Colour-changing Bat is Root-65 Leaper(possibly used before), the same as Gilman's (1,8)Ibis plus (4,7)Ibex. Rhinoceros is rider moving circle-like along one of sixteen possible paths from 1 to 8 steps. Fully 8 steps always mean the null move. Therefore, Rhinoceros is able to perform a 'self unpin', nothing but that null move; but self-unpin can be blocked if no pathway is available. Analysis of Alfil and Dabbabah coverage. One would hate to spoil this chess by playing it.

Charles Gilman wrote on Mon, Jul 28, 2003 04:56 PM UTC:
Sorry, I managed to put the same half of a sum in twice. The double equation should read mn=(ac+bd)²+(ad-bc)²=(ac-bd)²+(ad+bc)².

Charles Gilman wrote on Sun, Jul 27, 2003 09:23 AM UTC:Good ★★★★
The rating is mainly for the analysis of the Dabbaba and Alfil, and indeed
the fact those of each piece of the two armies combined cover the whole
board! On the whole I think that the eight colours would be better than
the 'more complicated arrangement'.
	The analysis of the Bat move is also interesting but there is one
omission. The fact that its leap length is the product of the Knight and
Zebra moves (as 65=5x13) is no coincidence. For any m=a²+b² and n=c²+d²
(all integers, but m and n not necessarily squares),
mn=(ac+bd)²+(ad-bc)²=(ad+bc)²+(ad+bc)². Thus Bat=KnightxZebra as
Camel=KnightxFerz.

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