or, 10k on just One Game a Day
Stop me if you've heard this one, but here's an idea for a large variant that doesn't require much new in the way of pieces or rules … just a bit of a twist in the way we look at movement potential.
Consider a very boring game of 10x10 Chess, with a couple extra pawns, a couple extra middle rows, and extra knights between the bishops and rooks. Yawn, ho hum, et cetera; not even a nightrider or an amazon to play with. Imagine next that you go to all the trouble of specifying movement rules this way: A rook can move (v: +/-x, h: 0) or (v: 0, h: +/-y). A bishop moves (v: +/-z, h: +/-z). A pawn moves (v:+1, h:0), or (v: +1, h: +/-1) to capture, and a king moves (v: +1/0/-1, h:+1/0/-1), and a knight either (v: +/-2, h: +/-1) or (v: +/-1, h: +/-2) … again, ho hum, right?
Well, now instead of a single 10x10 board, take 100 of them and lay those out in a 10x10 square. We specify the locations of the pieces with a handy binomial, "a1-A1" meaning "the square in the lower left-hand corner of the board in the lower left-hand corner" (where there's a white rook in the picture) and "d7-H4" meaning … well, you get what it means. There's a magenta knight there in the picture. Anyway, then we let the movement-and-capture rules apply to either half of the binomial, but only one half at a time.
So the whole thing looks like this:
There you have the white pieces at the bottom, in position to start a new game. Above them, a green king, blue bishop, yellow rook, cyan pawn and the aforementioned knight disport themselves, showing off the squares they can attack. Not, perhaps, the most profound piece of theory in the world. But it provides an imposingly large game and a challenge to the players' panoramic vision of the board, without adding unduly to the number of pieces or piece-types. Plus you might be able to get a game in and have the rest of the weekend free!
Lesser Points:
Long-range pieces ("riders") should be limited to x, y, z < 10, to make their new powers uniform with the others'.
Pawn promotion should take place upon reaching any square in the 10th rank of boards, not the 10th rank of squares nor (good heavens!) the very last rank of squares.
Rules for Castling could no doubt be worked out and put to use. Aside from the sheer thrill of it, though, I have no idea why you'd want to; the extra protection to be gained thereby would be practically nil.
Capturing en passant is a fairly recent refinement to the laws of FIDE Chess, meant to address a very delicate problem of balance. When Taiga or something like it has been played for a century or two, and the odd million games exhaustively analyzed, if someone cares to propose a similarly precious revision of its code I shall wish them well. But for the moment I think we can cripple along without it.
Hello, Dale. Thought I recognized the style. I like the concept of Taiga. This game may well work better than the first one I posted at CV, but let me steppe right along to my suggestion. You will find a problem in checkmating the king without some sort of way to confine the elusive piece. I would add the following rule to the game:
A king may hold the other player's king in one big square. When a player moves the king into the same big* square as the opposing player's king, the opposing player's king is "held". The opposing player's king keeps its moves on the little squares, but may not move out of the big square both kings are in. Only the opposing player's king is held. The player who created the hold may freely move the king out of the big square the enemy king is held in, even to get out of check, or to give a discovered check. This breaks the hold. Otherwise, both kings stay in the same big square until one of them is checkmated. The held king only needs to be checkmated in the big square it's in, it can't leave. The holding king, to be mated, must have all its allowed big square destinations guarded also.
*A "big" square is one of your 10x10 "building blocks" for the gameboard. Its boundaries are clearly shown by the color change. A little square is the individual square a piece sits on.
Good point, Joe. A king with 16 escape routes … That'll be hard to pin down, as the fakir said to the mohel. I suppose we might get by with just leaving the kings' movements unmodified; but that's hardly an elegant way to handle things—popping in an exception to the One New Rule for the first little problem that comes along. The king is supposed to be a dumpy little short-range piece, but really.
(Also, I can imagine Graeme asking, "Why let your king move at all? If you're going to have a special rule just for him, I find static target-pieces quite nice.")
Now if we were in the Mongolian end of the Taiga this would be half-sorted already: The generals would be stuck in the palaces anyway, and with a bit of twiddling (and the help of the opposing general) I bet we could nail 'em down.
But why leave the American end of the Taiga? I like your idea better anyway. But if I might suggest a modification to your modification, let's drop that business about "breaking the hold" … here we turn our eyes southward to our friends in Texas, and adopt the notion of the "Steel Cage Death-Match". Once the two kings are in the same big square, there they stay! No leaving by big step or regular steps is allowed.
I can see this adding a delightful tactical dimension to the dance of the kings, as they try to get close enough to start the deathmatch but not quite so close that the other can spring it on them before the supporting forces are ready. On the other hand, your version gives a decided advantage to the initiator of the hold, which might tempt a player with badly reduced forces to try it on … hmm. And then break away, only to be immediately followed by the other king, sealing his doom.
Well, well. I fully agree that we need something like this. My deathmatch version is the simpler rule to explain; your revocable version might make for the shortest games. So far, I guess I'm in favor of yours! —But surely the other members have something that beats us both. Anyone?
I had been working on a nearly indentical concept - using a 5x5 array of 5x5 boards - only to discover that someone else (Joe Joyce) had already thought of it (HyperChess), and that someone else (V.R. Parton) had thought of it before that (Sphinx Chess). Oh well; what has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. :)
Still, I think this is a fun idea to play around with. I've always liked the idea of 3D or 4D Chess, but had great difficulty visualizing moves. This method adds a new dimension (two, actually) without any new visualization necessary (though it does require much more careful attention). This could easily be expanded to 5D or 6D if desired, but that's just crazy-go-nuts.
One idea I've played with is replacing bishops with commoners (ie, non-royal kings), since bishops in this game would be colorbound on both boards, making them able to see only a fourth of the total squares. Even with four bishops, this might be tiresome. A commoner, on the other hand, could move to 16 squares and reach every part of the board.
One way to make the king easier to checkmate is to restrict him to his home plane. Like the castle in Xiang Qi, only with much more room to maneuver.
Another idea I've been toying with is limiting each side to orthogonal movers. Given the 4D nature of this board, each player could have a row of ten rooks without the worry of instant attacks as with a 2D board. One could then introduce queens that move like rooks, but have two moves per turn (but not two captures). Such a queen would be a planar mover able to reach any point on any plane that intersected with her starting point. An unrestrained planar queen on D4d4, for example, could move to any square in D4, any square on any d file in D, any square on any 4th rank in IV, or any d4 square on any of the planes.
Make the king of such a game move like a wazir (only six flight squares), and he suddenly becomes much easier to corner.
Make the number of ranks and files odd rather than even, and one could make a nice four-player game out of this.
One of the great unsolved problems in higher-dimensional chess is that of the "slippery king". Without some sort of rule to pin it down, the king is almost impossible to checkmate. I realized that when I was playtesting the original version of my first variant, Hyperchess [aka: hype]. I determined that, if the pieces were placed in any reasonable positions on the board, a king and 3 queens could not mate a lone king. After much pain, I came up with the "king hold" rule. I feel it gives each side a sporting chance, without resorting to "sitting duck" rules. Now, a "walking duck" rule, where the king is confined to one small portion of the board is, I believe, a mediocre solution, and takes away a valuable piece. [I think the complete sitting duck rule, where the king can't move at all, takes the game out of the realm of chess variants and turns it into a race game, basically a complicated game of tag, as the first to touch the other guy's king/home base wins, but we've all agreed I'm in the minority here… ;-) ] I'm also kind of opposed to "cripple the king" - I suspect you can tell from my choice of name - unless all the other pieces are equally crippled, as is done in the excellent game Seperate Realms by Mike Nelson [with Peter Aronson].
I first saw planar pieces in Gavin Walker Smith's Prince, a8 8x8x8 variant. He and Larry Smith [no relation] did some fairly extensive work on planar pieces in 3D. I'd like to suggest here that you might consider "cubic" pieces for a 4D game, as that seems to be the logical next step [but I'd have trouble keeping a straight face. But consider how a king that has all the orthogonal and diagonal moves in 4D would be able to escape - the king could, being on position w, x, y, z, change any one of its coordinate numbers by +/-1 [8 possibilities], any 2 [rats, I'm not even gonna try to figure these numbers out - without a math background, I'll have to lay them all out and count them!], any 3 or all 4 coordinates, some +, some -… Aaargh!
Correction: on a 4D board, a Wazir-king would have eight flight squares - the same number as a king in Orthodox Chess. This should make him easier to checkmate.
Triagonals in Raumschach are bad enough; I don't even want to think about the quadragonal movements that would be possible in a true 4D board. Think this big board + little board concept is much nicer.
Hi, Dale - hate to say this, but your Taiga.jpg is gone. Instead of the board picture, all that's there is the words: "Taiga.jpg".
Hope you can replace it, it was a pretty picture.
Joe