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Tripunch Chess. Knights become Nightriders, Rooks add Gryphon moves, Bishops add Aanca moves, and Queens become unbelievable. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Sep 24, 2014 02:18 PM EDT:

When I spoke of 'large board' I just meant that in comparison to the 8x8, where our intuition on the value of the Queen comes from. (Although historically the Queen was of course already an established piece of Chu Shogi long before it made its introduction in Chess.)

You are correct in that Chu by Shogi standards is not large, and that the term 'large Shogi variant' is typically reserved for Dai Dai, Maka Dai Dai and Tai Shogi (17x17, 19x19 and 25x15). Not because that is spectacularly larger than, say, Tenjiku Shogi's 16x16, but because these variants are so clearly related by similarity of the participating pieces. These 'large' variants feature dominating pieces like hook movers and Lion Dog, while Lion promotes to Furious Fiend. None of these pieces occur in the smaller variants Chu, Dai and Tenjiku Shogi, which are also very clearly related, and have similar pieces, except that in Tenjiku these are (obviously intentionally) supplemented by a 'zoo of weirdness'.

Btw, the issue of the pinning in Tripunch reminded me of an old Chess joke:

k . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . N . . . . .
. . . B . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . . . K . . .

White mates in 0.5.
(Answer: he lifts the Knight.)