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Macadamia Shogi. Pieces promote on capture to multi-capturing monsters. (13x13, Cells: 169) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Sun, Sep 17, 2023 06:44 AM UTC in reply to NeodymiumPhyte from 02:36 AM:

Good point. Strong promotion  is only useful when the piece survives, especially when any capturer would derive new rights from it. Similarly it sometimes pays to 'promote' to an inferior piece, because that would force the recapturer to demote even more,  possibly deterring the recapture altogether.

So I guess that making the Elephant immune to the contageon provides an interesting new twist to the tactics in this game, even apart from the promotion piece being royal.


NeodymiumPhyte wrote on Sun, Sep 17, 2023 02:36 AM UTC:

In my play against the diagram, I did come across a different situation in which one might want to promote an Elephant to a King instead of a Saint or Ghost. This occurs when one wants to deny the opponent the opportunity to get the Saint or Ghost by re-capturing. The diagram used this ability of the Elephant to prevent me from getting a Saint, and that actually saved it from almost certain defeat, though I doubt the diagram would have let that situation arise if Elephants didn't have this ability. Still, I completely didn't see it coming and went on to lose the game.


💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Sat, Sep 16, 2023 03:15 PM UTC in reply to NeodymiumPhyte from 02:24 PM:

Thank you for pointing this out. The rule for double capture that is generally assumend for Maka Dai Dai Shogi is that you would promote to the last one you capture of Saint and Ghost. The chairman of the Japanese Chu-Shogi association insisted that for a 2-out-1-in move it would be illegal to take the 2-out as a jump, so that you always have to capture the nearest piece first. In that case the rule becomes equivalent to what I wrote it in the article. The special script I embedded in this page to handle the promotions uses the original rule, deciding on sequence rather than distance.

But it seems I specified the Wolf's move in XBetza so that 2-out-1-in does jump 2-out first. Since this seems a "never happens" case, I did not pay much attention to it. ANy rule about it is made up in modern times, as the monks who conceived Maka Dai Dai Shogi did not specify any rule for it: they were sensible people, and did not address situations they knew would never happen in practice.

As to the Elephant promotion: this appears to be a consequence to the way I programmed the immunity to contageon for the royal pieces: I always force those to promote to their own promoted form, irrespective of what they capture, and this also suppressed the ability to defer promotion. Like you say, there never is any reason to defer, so I did not worry about this.

What worries me more is that the Elephant is considered a royal piece in this context. Because it really isn't, and if you can promote it you should have another royal already (or you would already have lost the game). I would certainly not prefer to have a second King in that case over having a piece as strong as a Saint or Ghost. Perhaps unless my other King is in checkmate and cannot escape capture on the next move. But even then, the newly acquired King would find itself in the front line where captures are going on, so the chances it will survive the next few moves seem dismal. So I think this is a rather non-sensical exemption, and wonder if it would not be better to drop that rule altogether.


NeodymiumPhyte wrote on Sat, Sep 16, 2023 02:24 PM UTC:

Also, the Elephant doesn't have the option to defer promotion when capturing the Capricorner. I don't know why anyone would want to defer promotion in this particular case, but it seems to be allowed in the rules.


NeodymiumPhyte wrote on Sat, Sep 16, 2023 02:16 PM UTC:

In the rules, it states, "If it captures both Saint (Priest) and Ghost (Pirate) in one turn, it promotes to the one that was farthest away from it." in the section about the Wolf and Saint, but the diagram seems to always just promote a Wolf corresponding to the one it captured second.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Fri, Nov 3, 2017 02:28 PM UTC:

Ok, my bad :)! Sorry for the misunderstanding :(! I usually don't like just writting initials because it leads to these kind of confusion though :(!


💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Nov 3, 2017 12:23 PM UTC:

L/R Chariot there means Left Chariot or Right Chariot. Not Lance or Reverse Chariot.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Fri, Nov 3, 2017 10:27 AM UTC:

@HG

I meant in the article, where you describe the promotions under rules section, I wasn't very clear, I apoligize for that :(!


💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Nov 3, 2017 09:54 AM UTC:

It seems I had broken something in the diagram script. Or rather, the changes for the new highlighting method activated a latent bug in the move generation. The diagram stores both pieces and highlight indicators in a board cell. But when testing whether the first leg of a hook mover has bumped into something, it was not ignoring the highlight indications. And because the Hook mover is RmasR, the squares over which the first leg of the hook move goes would already have been highlighted by the plain R component. Before I did not mark squares for normal moves or captures (just those that were targets lof locust captures, e.p. capture or castling), but I started doing that for resolving collisions between such moves and normal moves, to avoid they would eclipse each other in the move diagrams, and to make enforcement of legality possible. The problem would have manifested itself before if a hook move tried to go over an e.p. or locust-capture square, but of course no one ever conceived a piece that combined such moves.

I now fixed this by ignoring the highlight markers when testing whether the first leg is obstructed or can continue. (Flush browser cache!) Thanks for finding and reporting this.

@Aurelian: Not sure what you mean about the Lance. Is that in the piece lists next to the diagram, or in the piece table? I only see one Lance in either case.


Aurelian Florea wrote on Fri, Nov 3, 2017 07:05 AM UTC:

Also I think you have described the lance twice once by itself, and another time before when writting (L/R Chariot)


sirius628 wrote on Fri, Nov 3, 2017 12:19 AM UTC:

The written description says that the capricorner can reach any square of its color on an empty board, but the move diagrams says that it cannot. Same with the hook mover.


💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Jul 20, 2017 08:50 AM UTC:

You mean the star pictogram, in the Design Wizzard? Its root name is 'marshall'. The roofed simplified rook is 'crownedrook2'.

The symbol XBoard uses for the Commoner/Man is supposed to be a spiked helmet. Apparently my drawing talents are wanting.

'Goat' is from 'Scirocco', right? I think this is a brilliant and highly unerrated game. But then again, I like Chu Shogi...


sirius628 wrote on Mon, Jul 17, 2017 08:31 PM UTC:

Thank you for clarifying. Also, what is the image name for the kirin? I've tried "kirin", as well as "goat", which is an alternate name. My version lacks a kirin, but I would like to use the image for a different piece, which moves one square and is called a guard. I know you have an image for the "prince" or "commoner", which moves the same, but the image looks like a bell, which I don't like. The name of the guardian image would help as well.


💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Mon, Jul 17, 2017 08:33 AM UTC:

> I can't get the wolf to move to the third square cpaturing both the pieces on square 1 and 2.

Good observation! The JavaScript code that powers the interactive diagram currently cannot handle more than a single locust-capture victim. (I still have to work on that; I still regularly make improvements to that code to enhance its abilities. Pieces that fly over arbitrarily many others, like the Tenjiku Shogi Great General, are also still on the to-do list.) Currently the moves are internally encoded by 3 squares and a final piece type: the square between which the piece moves (with possibly replacement capture as a consequence), plus one 'e.p. square' that must be evacuated as a side effect of the move. I will have to add a second e.p. square to the move encoding, and modify the move-entry procedure to allow the user to specify it. The latest WinBoard/XBoard version is already adapted to allow that.


sirius628 wrote on Mon, Jul 17, 2017 12:38 AM UTC:

I can't get the wolf to move to the third square cpaturing both the pieces on square 1 and 2.


💡📝H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Mar 27, 2015 04:06 PM UTC:
Oops, you are right! Indeed I had these in an earlier version, but the board filling fraction was then higher than that of Maka Dai Dai Shogi. And it seemed to me that the Leopards were the least essential. At first I also had used the Chinese Cock and Blind Monkey instead of Kirin and Phoenix as representatives for the asymmetric pairs of pieces, but in the end favored the latter, because they have more interesting promotions (to pieces that have range-2 and range-3 moves, in stead of just steps and slides). I will fix the diagram.

And thank you for your appreciation. But I should stress that almost all credit should of course go to the Buddhist monks that designed Maka Dai Dai Shogi in the 15th century.

Jörg Knappen wrote on Fri, Mar 27, 2015 01:37 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Great game!

There is a minor glitch in the first diagram: It has two back Leopards (artefacts from an earlier version that was discarded?) in e/i 12.

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