Comments by Ed
I absolutely love when contributions to CV discuss how best to play chess variants. I thought that anyone who appreciated this article might like additional studies on Makruk endgame.
I found a very interesting site presenting 224 Makruk checkmate problems at http://www.tv5.co.th/service/mod/heritage/nation/thaichess/thaichess.htm The page is in Thai, but that should be no limitation on usefulness to anyone. The positions and their solutions are all diagramatic.
The checkmate problems begin at the sixth link down on the left on the main page. The pages are generally thematic and stress how to deliver checkmate efficiently with minimal material.
So, if one moves the river, can this cause pawns to demote when they are again situated on their own side of the river? If there is no game courier version likely, has the author tried playing this with a ZRF or over the board? I assume that the relative orientation of the palace is constant, i.e., the edge closest to the opponent always faces the same direction and that the palace cannot be reoriented, say, rotated through 90° as well as or in lieu of other movement. I assume from the description of the river's movement as one step towards oneself or towards the opponent at a time that the river maintains its orientation and does not rotate through 90° either. This looks like an interesting variant.
Recently I came across some shatar problem literature, a couple of collections of what seem to be checkmate problems, but they differ in some respects from international chess checkmate problems so that I wonder either if we have a complete understanding of Mongolian checkmate rules or of aesthetic conventions that may be dear to Mongolians in their chess play. In not a few of the examples in these collections the solutions proposed are not the most efficient (sometimes the diagram has an immediate checkmate by our conventions but that does not use all the material on the board), involve the pieces gaining the checkmate from the initial position moving only once, and seem all to end with checkmate being delivered by a pawn. I wonder if there is in addition to the prohibition of delivering immediate checkmate by pawn a superior win condition because checkmate is delivered finally by a pawn after a series of checks (maybe extra stakes if a bet had been placed on the game?). I wonder also if there is a prohibition on repeated or multiple checks by the same piece. I know of no authentic shatar game scores on which to conjecture an opinion. My inferences are based only on the diagrams and solutions to be read in these Mongolian texts; I am completely sure that a chess master composing a book of problems must not fail to see an immediate checkmate that someone like me could recognize. And yet, I cannot read Mongolian so as to understand the description of the conventions and goals of such problem literature as he may have seen fit to record. I hope that a Mongolian shatar player could enlighten me. As to identifying the historical source for chess among the Mongolians, I wonder if this inference about pawn-delivered checkmate as a flourish of good chess play would be another datum pointing to a Persian-Arab ancestor rather than one directly from India.
Dear Editor, I found an image of a Chinese chess variant (http://www.hudong.com/versionview/idl,pAUWBxBWVKVEd2U,kVZZA) that I don't recognize and wonder if you know what one it is. I have searched on your website but have found nothing similar. From what I can see, the board has been lengthened by two ranks on each side of the river, the extended range of the elephant inscribed on the board, and the governor used for both sides as the royal piece in the fortress; the generals (two per side) are positioned for a new function, it seems, outside the fortress. Thanks in advance for your help.
I found an image of a Chinese chess variant (http://www.hudong.com/versionview/idl,pAUWBxBWVKVEd2U,kVZZA) that I don't recognize and wonder if anyone knows what one it is. I have searched on the Chessvariants' website but have found nothing similar. From what I can see, the board has been lengthened by two ranks on each side of the river, the extended range of the elephant inscribed on the board, and the governor used for both sides as the royal piece in the fortress; the generals (two per side) are positioned for a new function, it seems, outside the fortress.
I see a new English-language work on Sittuyin has been made available on the internet: http://www.scribd.com/doc/79655591/How-to-Play-Myanmar-Traditional-Chess-EnG-BOOK-1 I thought that it was very helpful both for its diagrammatic presentation of 37 opening arrays, its practical summaries of endgame positions and move counting in endgame, and other helpful details for playing this worthy form of chess.
Dear Mr. Gabor: Perhaps I am mistaken, but I think that this is a local feature of chess play that once prevailed in a number of locales in central Europe eastward. I seem to recall Murray in his _History of Chess_ proposing such a feature as evidence of an 'undercurrent' of Mongolization in western chess that would date from the time of the Golden Horde. He also posited the sway of chess clubs, I think, as the most effective instrument for these local customs disappearing, but clearly they endure in Hungary.
@Mats: I have enjoyed your ZRF very much for a while. Without wishing to sound ungrateful for your effort, which I most certainly esteem, if there would be one thing that I might change about it (for aesthetic purposes only, to be sure, and for some kind of nod to the exotic origin of the game), it would be to use graphics like those in diagrams in native shatar literature, at least as an option. One would still have to produce a suitable graphic for the hia, though, and the representation of the king as a palace or pagoda was a bit surprising for me at first when I saw it. I would provide images to illustrate, but the books I consulted were part of a library collection of Mongolian materials. These books were printed in Inner Mongolia, so I have no way of verifying that the practice holds in the Republic of Mongolia or Tuva. For a while I had hoped to be able to submit details about other large shatar variants that seem to have been played historically in Mongolia. My correspondent from Ulaanbaatar tantalized me by mentioning 9x9, 10x10 (hiashatar), 11x11, and 12x12 board sizes, but made no mention of the pieces populating the board or powers they possess. As to hiashatar, I was hoping to have more information from my correspondent to resolve what seems the variability in the moves reported for the hia. I hope that an English-speaking Mongolian (or Chinese with access to fuller information in authoritative sources) might read this and supply us with more detail.
Mats, Thank you for the alternate playing set for hiashatar in your ZRF, which plays quite well. The hia in this ZRF creates all manner of delicious positional paradoxes that allow him to shepherd a passed pawn rather effectively to promotion, I notice. Your ZRF carries it off much more convincingly than I have over the board. I see that you used images that look like R. Pozzi's hiashatar set, a truly appealing group that adds another level of aesthetic appeal to the ZRF. My own set, different from that one, presents the hia as an armed warrior standing with hand to the ready on the hilt of his sword -- one side, the aggressors, sneering at the opponents. I rather prefer the wizened features of the advisers of Pozzi's set, so thanks again.
@Mats: I added a favorable comment on the page linking to your excellent hiashatar ZRF, which I will not repeat here. I only wanted to give a link for anyone interested in the kind of diagram to which I refer in native shatar literature: http://shop.kongfz.com/show_pics.php?shopId=6625&bookId=34840797 The image shows some pieces in a diagram that decorate the book cover of a problem collection. I wish I had clearer page images to refer to, but the point is somewhat moot, given the fine, aesthetically pleasing solution that Mats offers in his ZRF.
@Mats Winther: For your Sittuyin ZRF, would you be willing to add traditional piece graphics like the ones in this Sittuyin guide: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13125331/Myanmar%20Chess.zip ? I wonder if you could also add some of these standard setups as options to select, or the other setups not in Maung Maung Lwin's book that are found in David Pritchard's earlier Encyclopedia of Chess Variants (p. 32)?
@Yu Ren Dong: Thank you for this information. I had seen this book advertised and wondered about the content. I wonder if it includes game scores that illustrate the differences of rules, variations, etc. I wonder also if it describes in a more complete fashion the large versions of shatar that I understand are played on 9x9, 10x10, 11x11, 12x12 boards. You were very kind to supply these details.
@Yu Ren Dong: Thank you for this additional information. I would feel guilty asking for copies of the whole book (pesky copyright laws and rights to intellectual property, and all that), but I think that your response answers the initial question that I wrote: there are superior forms of victory, and these positions (and the ones that you put on wikipedia) illustrate principles in problems. I had considered that the enlarged forms of shatar might be regional: I had wondered if there production might be related to the activities of Buddhist monasteries. It is wild conjecture on my part to think that Japanese Buddhist monks might have thought up enlarged forms of shogi, and therefore, that Mongolian Buddhist monks might have thought up enlarged forms of shatar.
@Yu Ren Dong: In the book that you mention, è’™å¤è±¡æ£‹, would you say that 圖嘿 are a kind of special problem literature, a variation on shatar, or a category of possible win conditions that has gone unnoticed in English-language literature until now? I saw that you made additions to the Chinese wiki page for shatar. I wonder if you might, please, submit to the editors a revision, expansion, or additional page on shatar based on your research. I would greatly appreciate their permitting more data on this interesting regional form of chess. Thanks!
I truly like this set of chu shogi. Recently I came across what seems to be a chu shogi variant and wonder if anyone knows the rules: http://shogi.me/blog/2011/03/kyushu-chess-championship/ The variant is played on a 10x10 board with some of the chu shogi pieces as one can see in the second photo. In the first one can make out pieces missing from the second photo but that belong to a chu shogi set. The blog author questions whether the variant is the invention of the man in the photograph. It clearly is intended as a simplification of chu shogi, since the board geometry and number of piece types has been reduced. I assume it does not use drops, since the drunk elephant is on the board, but this is all guesswork. I would welcome information. Thanks!
Thank you, Dr. Bagley-Jones, for a most logical and direct solution. For my part, I feared that that other blog's inactivity for the last year and a half might mean it remains only as a monument, and, of course, the author himself wrote about his own lack of knowledge on the subject in the post where the pictures are to be seen. I have for many years relied on this site as a source for good knowledge about chess variants and expected my chances of getting an informed reply quickly would be improved as a result of posting my question here. I hope this community can help me answer this question. Best wishes---
@Yu Ren Dong: I was reading an article of Ivor Montagu in British Chess of 1958. He mentions that there is an ancient treatise on Mongolian chess in the National Library of Ulaanbaatar. I wonder if that source is cited in the book on Mongolian chess that you quoted in earlier comments or if you know whether that book has been transcribed or translated into other languages. @MatsWinther: I wonder if you have made a ZRF for Mongolian chess like your very nice ZRF for hiashatar. I have to say that scripting some of the checkmate limitations has been a bit of a nightmare for us to attempt. Best wishes!
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