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GraTiA. A blend of two historic variants. (13x12, Cells: 156) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Charles Gilman wrote on Fri, Mar 18, 2011 07:01 AM UTC:
To clarify, no variant is a combination of other variants in their entirety - except perhaps ones like Easterhouse - and even then a third variant, Bughouse, appears only as a concept. There are some that tweak the array of one variant with an element of another. The example that comes to mind is Storm the Ivory Tower, which modifies the Xiang Qi array with Take the Brain's theme of varying pieces' directions by square. It does not in any sense have the Take the Brain array. Then there are variants that take concepts from other variants and combine them in a completely new way, and Hex Shogi is of that kind. It takes a huge amount from Shogi, the concepts of including part-symmetric pieces and mixed-range promotees, but no hex variant is simply Shogi transferred to a different board. There have been at least six hex analogues to FIDE Chess, three apparently independent of each other, and differing in ways varying from slight tweaks of each other to completely different approaches. In fact, Hex Shogi uses concepts from two historic hex variants. The orientation and definition of the forward orthogonal are those of Wellisch. The substitution of hex diagonals for square ones, however, is one attempted in Glinsky's variant and realised more completely in McCooey's.