Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

This is essentially chess with cannons and elephants added. It appears to play rather well. I like it a lot.

However; in my in-progress game my opponent has 2 light-squared Bishops and no Dark-Squared Bishop. I have one of each. The reason is that when the game begins Black has a Bishop on h9 and a Knight on g9. By the rules this is wrong.

The pre-set needs to be corrected so that the initial setup has a Bishop on g9 and a Knight on h9. Of course, players can manually fix this when they begin a game, but like me, many may assume a correct setup is present and not notice the error for the first few moves.

This game looks to be well thought out.  I am pleased to see the
re-unification of the game as it is perceived through both eastern and
western eyes.  Each stands to gain something from the other.
I am glad it was submitted to the 3rd Courier tournament.  Thanks also to
Hans B. for the translation from the French.

Chess according to Zillions: Q=7.6 R=4.6 B=3.2 N=2.7 P=1
Shako according to Zillions: Q=8.9 R=5.6 B=3.6 N=3.0 P=1 C=5.5 E=2.9
Xiang Qi according to Zillions: R=5.4 C=5.35

Chess : Q=9 R=5 B=3.3 N=3 P=1
XiangQi : R=12 C=6 H=5 E=3 F=2 P= 1 or 2 (before or after crossing the
River) -- so Zillions is very wrong about R=C.
Cylindrical Chess: R=B (two eight-square files) --  colourboundness
doesn't matter. Zillions should be right about N=E (eight squares) for
Shako.

I would add something for the Cannon and substract something for the Queen
because a Cannon is as dangerous as a Knight to a Queen (and an Elephant
isn't, by the way). So,
Q=10 R=5.5 C=4 B=4 N=3 E=2.8 P=1 in the opening.
Q=10 R=6 B=4 C=3 N=3 E=2.8 P=1 in the midgame.
Q=10 R=6.5 B=4 N=2.5 E=2.5 C=2 P=1 in the endgame (if the Pawn isn't
particularly strong, of course).

Unicorn=10, Queen=10, Chancellor=9, Rook=5.5, Lion=4.5(?)

Bishop=3.5, Knight=3, Elephant=2.5, Pawn=1

are endgame piece values (for Shako and Unicorn Great Chess) which preserve some formulas I firmly believe in, namely Q+P = R+R and Q = R+B+P and R+P = B+N. The Cannon should be worth 4 Pawns at the start of the game, but decline to half the value of a Rook in the endgame (2.75 Pawns). I consider short range pieces to have more value than Antoine Fourrière gives them in his Comment. Even the lowly Ferz should be worth 1.5 Pawns on a 10x10 board. EDIT [March 2007] I decided to bump the Lion up to 5 full points. The Ferz still looks good to me.

bug in the preset?
i can't castle... thanks in advance.

when people get bored of how repetitive and figured-out FIDE Chess is (like Bobby Fischer did) this along with a few others has a possibility of replacing it. Elephants and Cannons both bring new strategy elements such as a sort of no extra development necessary, and Cannons add a new edge to attacks. Cannons can also artificially pin Kings. Cannons and Kings cannot checkmate bare Kings, but a Cannon, King and Knight can.

Elephants are a third minor piece (though Bishops are stronger than before), which I prefer since minor piece feels like a more useful term and minor pieces feel more like a currency than a coincidence. Also, Elephants (and Cannons) developing naturally doesn't interfere with any other piece development, and developing Elephants attacks pawns while being weaker than Knights. I could probably go on to talk about some openings which are playable and some which aren't but this is getting long.

I'm writing an article on this game but I'm not sure if links to it would be allowed.
I'll post a few extracts:
"... The elephant gained the power to move one square diagonally, allowing it to reach any square of the same colour it starts on, whereas the original elephant from Chaturanga could only reach a few squares on the entire 8 by 8 board.

The pieces have been carefully guarded so that the cannon is not able to take a piece after just a few moves without it being captured back.

Personally I haven’t had the chance to try this game out thoroughly yet, so I’m not sure how well it plays out, but just for the sake of the “East meets West” ideology, I think it is worth playing. I would possibly also add the silver from Japanese chess as the piece appears in Thai chess, Burmese chess as well, thus making it more “East”, since the only “Eastern-ness” of the game is only from the cannon, whereas the addition of the elephant piece represented a majority of the old chess forms, such as Kurierspiel (where the elephant still existed), Chaturanga and Shatranj."

A lovely use of cannons and modern elephants, on a 10x10 board. I'd note that since defending each side's edge pawns can be an issue at times (as can be the development of either elephant), that alone seems to slightly inhibit the players from emulating many standard chess openings beyond a certain depth, but this is apparently very common for chess variants.

I'd tentatively estimate the piece values (on this game's 10x10 board) as follows: P=1; E=2.75; C=2.75(but 3.5 before endgame); N=3; B=3.5; R=5.5; Q=10; K's fighting value=2.5.

Here's 2 large CVs that also use cannons in the corners:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/soho-chess

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/wide-soho-chess

The initial pawn double move in this game's preset works fine but the message box stating that the move is marked as ilegal still apears. Maybe someone could check it out :)!

I fixed the two-step move of the Black Pawns in Shako. The p function, which is used only for potential moves, had "checkatwostep #0 #1 0 1 0 1" in it instead of "checkatwostep #0 #1 0 -1 0 -1". The negative values were needed because Black Pawns move down from higher rank numbers to lower rank numbers. So I changed this in the include file for the game.

Thanks Fergus :)!

I wish I could edit this page to present it in a better manner, and consistently with my other variants. Is that possible?

You can certainly edit the html file and send it to an editor to re-upload. To migrate it to a member submission would be nicer, but harder; if we created a member submission page and could attach the current itemID I think it would correctly assign favorites, comments, etc., but I'm not sure if lacking the MS prefix of a member submission would break anything? There are surely also absolute links to this page, so we'd need a redirect, but that's no problem.

Ben, why not giving me the right to edit the page to make it simple? If I can edit the pages of my other variants why not editing Shako? If we do this way, no links will be lost. If for any reason my new edition wouldn't satisfy you or other editors, it would always be possible for you to restore the previous version.

I think Shako would deserve a better page with better graphics.

Our old pages like this one are hard html files, whereas the new submissions ("member submissions") store their content in the database. (All the pages have indexing information in the database.)

So you can edit "member submissions" using forms that pull up the database fields, let you edit them, and then push updates to the database. But older files like this one cannot be edited from a web form. Instead, you can edit the html file itself, and an editor can upload it to the site; it isn't so much about editorializing, just the technology. (You'd have to send us the new image files too; there's another benefit to the modern member submissions: we've added file upload scripts.)

In my previous post I started to think about how to migrate an old style page to the new format. If Fergus and Greg think it's not unreasonable we might try that. When I have time I'll give it a try on our dev/backup site.

I have an idea, but maybe it will not work. This is my idea: if I write a new page for Shako as a "member submissions". Then someone just removes all contents in the existing Shako page except a link directing to the new one. Will it work?