Toroidal Honeycomb Combined Courier Chess
Final Board
I have for now ceased dveloping this variant but it has lead to ExCoCo Chess
Inroduction
This variant is a work in progress and comments are welcome. It was inspired by Charles Gilman's Honeycomb Chess.
The board
I have extended the board to 10 levels with each level composed of 45 hex-prisms, and joined the last level to the first level to form a ring or torus-like construct.
Movement
| The image on the right illustrates the 2 basic movements, orthogonal and diagonal, and also the Knight's move. Orthogonal moves are made by passing through a face to an adjacent hex-prism cell. There are 8 orthogonal directions and the Black Wazir at Hb2 can move to the cells with a white dot. Diagonal moves are made by passing through an edge to an adjacent hex-prism cell. There are 12 diagonal directions and the White Ferz at Hb7 can move to the cells with a blue dot. The Knight moves 2 steps in any orthogonal direction followed by 1 orthogonal step at right angles to the initial direction. The Knight can thus reach a maximum of 24 cells One-half of the moves available for theWhite Knight at Ie3 are shown by the red dots. |
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The pieces
The pieces used are taken from the Courier and Courier-Spiel variants, with the overall number of pieces being equal to 2 sets from each game. Each player thus starts the game with 96 pieces made up as follows:
| Name | Number | Move |
|---|---|---|
| king | 1 | 1 step in any direction. |
| rook | 4 | up to 8 steps in a single orthogonal direction. May not leap intervening pieces. |
| knight | 5 | 2 steps in any orthogonal direction followed by 1 step at right angles. May leap intervening pieces. |
| bishop | 4 | up to 8 steps in a single diagonal direction. May not leap intervening pieces. |
| elephant | 6 | 2 steps in a single diagonal direction. May leap any intervening piece. |
| ferz | 6 | 1 step in a diagonal direction. |
| guard | 5 | 1 step in any direction. |
| wazir | 6 | 1 step in an orthogonal direction. |
| minister | 5 | as either ferz or elephant. |
| horse-guard | 4 | as either guard or knight. |
| queen | 2 | as either bishop or rook. |
| pawns | 48 | 1 step forward, either orthogonally when not capturing, or diagonally when capturing. |
Rules
The next image shows the board and the starting array:
and an alternative board:
Promotion
Promotion occurs when a Pawn, Ferz, Wazir or Elephant reaches the opponent's home level
- Pawns promote to Guards
- Elephants promote to Horse-Guards
- Ferz promote to Bishops
- Wazirs promote to Rooks
page revision: 17, last edited: 18 Jun 2007 02:47
The game sounds and looks complicated. Does it have to be toroidal?
By the way, what do you think of S Courier Chess ?
Hi, Abdul-Rahman;
This looks like a nice variant. When I get my own computer back from the shop in a few days, I'll be happy to play a game with you. May ask you to play one of my odd games - a comparable one - as a swap, but, as always, that's up to you - I'll take or issue you you a challenge for SC Chess soon anyway.
Enjoy,
Joe
Yes, I think it is complicated - but then I'm beginning to suspect that any variant in more than 2-D, especially with unusually shaped cells, may be essentially too complex to play "just for fun". Really I started this variant because I was intrigued by the board and the possibility of circular 3-D chess. I also liked the board graphicss with the radial-hex tessellation.
S Courier looks a very playable variant,but I'll add my comments to the page itself.