International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day: My Donation

[womzilla]

An initiative by papersky, explained here, to encourage people to share their work online as, well, support for the idea that sharing things online is neither insane nor evil. I made some comments on this last week.

Anyway, it's a cause I strongly believe in, but I don't have much work which isn't encumbered by other people's copyrights--a card game I designed for Unplugged Games, an expansion set for Tales of the Arabian Nights which I designed for Crossover. But I do have a couple of good chess variants which I've played many times and which I gave to the world years ago.

Hecatomb

Start with a standard chessboard. Place the kings in their normal starting positions. Fill the rest of the board with queens, 31 on each side. That's it—all of the other rules of Chess are in effect.



Hecatomb plays quickly, but with a fair amount of tactical depth. After some preliminary capturing, almost every move is a check, which pleases my inner patzer and keeps the tension level high. Complex crystals of queens develop as the board thins—emergent complexity at its finest. If you want to try it out, there's a free Hecatomb module available for Zillions of Games. Hecatomb is actually part of a family of games, which I collectively call "Zanzibar Chess" (after John Brunner's seminal novel about overpopulation, Stand on Zanzibar). One can just as easily play Hecatomb with rooks instead of queens, or with dragon chariots (a Shogi piece that moves like a bishop but can also move one square orthogonally), or pawns.

Ur Chess

Ur Chess is a semi-serious attempt to streamline Chess by taking out most of the "fiddly" rules--rules which apply only to single pieces or in very unusual situations.

Setup: As normal, except that the pawns all begin on the third/sixth rank.



And then play Chess with these changes:

• A player who cannot make a legal move loses. (No stalemate.)
  
• A player who is reduced to only a king loses.
  
• No player may repeat a previous board position.
  
• No castling.
  
• No pawn doublestep (that is, a pawn always moves one step forward, never two).
  
• No en passant.
  
• Pawns can promote when they move in the opponent's territory.
  
• Pawns promote only to eliminated pieces.
  
• Pawns capture by moving one space forward.
  

Weirdly, this last rule is the most controversial--I got a blistering letter from a Chess master who thought that it reduced the game to triviality. Apparently, he had never heard of Xiang Qi or Shogi, which have such pawns. So, there is an official Ur Chess variant:

• Pawns can move and capture into any of the three forward spaces.

More information on the genesis of these games can be found on The Games Journal, a mostly retired monthly online gaming magazine.

Enjoy!

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As normal, except that the pawns all begin on the third/sixth rank.

Why? Why is that necessary for the game's dynamics to work?

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

It's explained in more detail in the Games Journal page to which I linked, but basically, for two reasons.

First, pawn doublestep was created to cover the distance between the sides of the board more quickly and to bring the pawn walls into contact early. Eliminating the doublestep means I needed some other way to accomplish this goal. All the East Asian chesses--the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Burmese, and Thai versions--have weak and advanced pawns.

Second, castling was invented to help get the rooks into play at the center of the board and able to protect each other. Having a free rank for them to advance into accomplishes this just as well. (This idea I borrowed from Christiaan Freeling's Grand Chess, which implements it somewhat differently.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's interesting. I knew, of course, that some chess players like to try out variant rules to see what effect they have on strategy. But none of the chess books I read during my brief adolescent interest in the subject explained the reasons for the various rules. They would tell you, from a practical playing standpoint, when you'd want to apply them, but never why they were there in the first place.