Enter Your Reply

The comment about Eastern games having a lower piece density applies, at
least as national standard games goes, only to the Chinese and Korean ones.
The Burmese, Mongolian, and Thai ones all have the same board and size of
armies that European forms of Chess inherited from Shatranj. Shogi, despite
its larger board, has very nearly a 50% piece density, and more or less
retains it as the pieces keep coming back - what one reference book
describes as preventing the kind of endgame to which Europeans are used. So
if we are to learn anything from the East to apply to 3d Chess, it should
perhaps be to allow captured pieces to return, to maintain enough strength
to bring Checkmate about.