Chess-Related Games (Are A Thing I Like)

So, with the help of the Java applets at the Chess Variant Pages, I've learned the basics of how to play shogi, the Japanese game most closely related to chess.

(Never mind the fact that the English-speaking users of the site call shogi and the other games I'm talking about "chess variants" like a bunch of ethnocentric butts; when they say "chess," they mean "game played on a board with pieces that move geometrically," not "the western game descended from a game from India which was originally just another variant itself." Chess players take themselves awfully darned seriously for people obsessed with a game that can be played more effectively by a mathematical pattern than a human brain.)

I've had a fair bit of fun playing shogi this way.

I've also learned the basics of playing xiangqi, the Chinese game most closely related to chess.

I've also had fun playing xiangqi this way.

I've learned the basics of playing janggi, the Korean game which is mostly a lot like xiangqi.

I... haven't had much fun playing janggi, because I hate the elephants. But I won't go into that too much, because I don't feel like dwelling on my incoherent rage. (The cannons also aren't nearly as fun as in xiangqi. Yes, xiangqi has cannons. It's kind of awesome, and they're the whole reason I play it.)

I've also, thanks to similarity between the games, played some yitong, which doesn't have a Wikipedia article, presumably because it's not actually much of a game.

Whether this game is an accurate recreation of a particularly popular game or not is irrelevant; what's relevant is that the red army, which you might notice is down quite a few pieces, probably will always win when a player is of reasonable skill. Why?

Chess has several kinds of pieces; the most powerful piece in modern international chess, the queen, is the combination of the two next-strongest pieces. An even stronger piece adds the knight's movement to become a piece so dangerous that it could take on most of a chess army by itself.

The rook (actually a chariot) that the red army retains from its original lineup is three combined pieces, the chariot/rook, the horse (a knight that doesn't jump), and a cannon. The thing about adding a cannon to a rook/chariot is that the only thing that holds back a rook from being unstoppable is that pieces block it; a cannon can and must jump a piece to attack, and so this is a nearly unblockable rook that also attacks a wide area. This piece would arguably be stronger than the aforementioned queen/knight hybrid piece, and as long as you don't do anything stupid, you can checkmate quickly and easily with that piece.

While it's not much of a game, though, it's still fun. Stupid fun, but fun regardless.

*I can't, as I noted in the title text, tell pieces in shogi, xiangqi, or janggi apart well. Unfortunately, whoever edited the shogi article there thinks that pictorial representations on shogi tiles are stupid and irrelevant, and so I couldn't form associations with pieces until I played with the Java applet, whose programmer had no such snobby ideas. It's awfully hard to get interested in something where someone marginalizes you for not being able to read the language they're using. The article says that the pieces can be told apart by size, but that's not helpful either. Fortunately, the Chess Variant Pages are friendlier about pictorial representations in general.

-Signing off.

Java: Bad At Chess

So I was playing Java applet chess, specifically a variant called "Dead Square Chess," wherein pieces explode and destroy squares they're sitting on and nearby pieces when they do so.

Turns out that the simple chess AI that operates the variant... is COMPLETELY TERRIBLE at the game.

Also, it's possible to checkmate with a pair of bishops while the bishops are under attack and aren't defending each other. (Trust me, this is a pretty big deal in chess. And yes, that's a checkmate.)

If you're wondering just how bad a player the computer is: Despite the rules making pawns proportionately the most powerful pieces (since you can just throw them heedlessly at the opponent because of their numbers), the computer repeatedly used stronger pieces with better moves to try to stop my pawns from advancing.

I'm a nerd.

-Signing off.

...Um... Yeah, I've Got Five Minutes To Do A Post

I mentioned recently that I've been browsing a website called The Chess Variants Pages.

It's kind of an old, deadlink-riddled place, but as a huge nerd who loves chess and fairy chess, I've been having fun at it.

Two of my singular favorite things I've found there are Chess with Different Armies, created by the always imaginative and entertaining Ralph Betza (an inactive but ranked chess master) and Litrof Litrôf Litròf Litróf.

Chess with Different Armies uses Betza's assessments of piece value to allow chess players to use different pieces in chess setups from the traditional ones against the traditional pieces and each other without having unbalanced games. (Apparently, two of the teams are slightly too strong, but their unique nature and the fact that people haven't learned how to use them as well just yet makes the difference negligible unless you're playing against a computer, which doesn't need to "learn" the pieces to play well with them.)

Litróf is a chess-like game which uses Icehouse pieces (little translucent colored plastic pyramids) to construct your army at the beginning of a game. While I don't think Litróf is perfect or anything, it's a fantastic framework for a game, and that alone makes me want some Icehouse pieces or a reasonable substitute.

-Signing off.

No, "Dratp" Is Not A Typo

So I found out recently while looking into chess variants (yes, really-turns out that I'm a huge chess nerd, and this is surprising how?) that there was a commercial board game called Navia Dratp that was heavily inspired by chess and shogi, but playing into the then-current anime monster craze and the popularity of miniature wargaming.

And it had promos in Japan which apparently were not only for the game, but a possible planned anime.

And they're modestly cool and completely hilarious. (Note: Some moderately intense and cartoonishly bloody violence and at least a little bit of fanservice.)



(I am aware that I may be the only person to find this actively funny. I don't care.)

So what does all that anime stuff have to do with a chess/shogi-based board game?

Other than the fact that the monsters therein are the same character designs as the collectible pieces and the "Navia" are the "royal" pieces (i.e. you lose it and you lose the game), not... anything, that I can tell.

If you're wondering what "Navia Dratp" is supposed to mean, in-game the pieces that are less like pawns (which aren't collectible pieces) need resources in order to be promoted or "Dratped" (pronounced "dropped" or "DORAPPUUED") to activate their abilities and enhanced movement. If you gather enough resources to "Dratp" a Navia (which is quite a large amount), it's an instant win-hence one of the important features of the game is a "Navia Dratp." (Elegantly, the pawn-type pieces generate your resources. Also, I presume that crazy big magic thing that the Navia did at the end of the first segment in the video is supposed to be a "Navia Dratp.")

It's interesting enough that I might well hunt down a couple of sets.

-Signing off.

In A Galaxy Far, Far Away, Chess Is Boring (and Buggy)

Thus far, I haven't had a single post this week that didn't include either the "chess" or "Star Wars" tags. That's not changing today.

As should be evident, I like chess pretty well. I also like computer chess games (most of the time). And I like Star Wars.

So Star Wars chess ought to be awesome, right?



Not so much.

While the animations are pretty clever (if rather bizarre), the incredible, mind-numbing slowness of it all makes it painful to sit through. What's more, if you watch carefully, you can tell that the computer wouldn't let the player make legal moves. There's something wrong with the program, whether it's an interface issue or just bad programming.

Probably still better than Chess Titans, though.

-Signing off.

Random Absurdity

I like absurd things; if you've been here for a while, you've probably figured that out.

Here's a cg animation of chess pieces dressed as Spartans and Persians as they appeared in "300." (Note that there are a few sprays of blood, but there's nothing too violent.)



And here is game footage from Age of Empires 2 where some cars drive around killing everything. Yes, some cars drive around killing everything.



And from some Age of Empires game, a cartoony trap.



Note that apparently, the trap took more resources to create than the war elephants did.

-Signing off.

Too Big Shogi

The game of chess is played in many parts of the world, but it isn't truly an immutable constant. It's descended from a different game, and other games also descended from that one. The relative of chess that I find most intriguing is Japan's shogi, whose name means "general's game."

Unfortunately, shogi is a counter-intuitive game for a chess player; pieces generally have rather bizarre movesets rather than chess's hyperstandardized ones (chess's memorable simplified moves were arrived at after centuries of simplification), and it's difficult for someone who can't read Japanese characters to keep the pieces apart, as the pieces pretty much all look the same. Further, capturing and promoting work rather differently-when you capture a piece, while it is removed from the board, it becomes yours to "drop" or deploy back onto the board.

The real reason the game fascinates me is because of the numerous alternate rulesets that are known to exist. True to Japan's nature, they invented more different ways to play the game that were hideously and hilariously bizarre and complicated. The most notable variations on this idea are the "dai shogi" ("great" or "big" shogi) variants.

Of these, Wikipedia notes: "It is thought that the really huge games (dai shogi and up) were never really played to any significant extent and were devised merely so that the creators could have the fun of inventing enormous games, amazing their friends and confounding their enemies."

Let's look at a few of the rules on size for these games...

Dai dai shogi ("big, big" shogi): 17x17 board, 289 squares, 96 pieces per player, 64 piece types, and 68 move types. (The reason there are more movement types than piece types is because you promote a piece by flipping it over, and the promoted piece has its own often entirely new move type or moveset. Fortunately, many pieces promote into pieces virtually identical to other pieces, and many different pieces will promote into the same pieces.)

Tai shogi ("grand" shogi): 25x25 board, 625 squares, 177 pieces per player, 93 piece types, and 96 move types. (I have an old program that only runs on pre-2000 versions of Windows that will run shogi variants up to tai shogi. In fact, I was able to find a YouTube video of someone playing tai shogi with the same or a similar program. It looks... byzantine-if you pay attention towards the middle, each side seems to set up huge lines and advance in waves, in a way that, if you're familiar with chess, looks impossible.)

Taikyoku shogi ("ultimate" shogi): 36x36 board, 1,296 squares, 402 pieces per player, 209 piece types, and 253 move types.

Here's a diagram of taikyoku shogi's piece setup (lifted from Wikipedia). (You can also find pictures of the setup here.)

After a brief calculation, a board for taikyoku shogi with 1.5" squares (there's no information on how big a shogi board's squares traditionally are, so I checked a chess board I dug up) would be four and a half feet to a side.

Yeah, I don't think that would be too practical. (For that matter, tai shogi is slightly too big for my old computer's monitor, and I have to tweak the heck out of it to see the whole board.) I suppose it's just as well nobody's really sure how to actually play taikyoku shogi. (That is to say, nobody knows absolutely for sure what all the rules are.)

-Signing off.

Computer Chess

I was playing around with a computer chess game today (I won't name any names [well, actually, I will-"Chess Titans"], but it was intended to be a Solitaire-type game such as is found on most computers) and got, well, just a bit frustrated.

I'm not a chess master, but I don't think I'm a slouch at it either. So why can't I beat the easiest setting on this particular chess game? The best I could manage was a draw because I eliminated all of the opponent's non-king pieces (admittedly, that shouldn't really be counted as a "draw," but chess can be weird), and at the second lowest setting, it utterly crushed me. And this was when I used the undo button several times. (Further granted, I don't play chess that often, and my game is probably a bit rusty.)

The problem is that the computer 1) can't be psyched out, faked out, or have its head messed with, and 2) it never makes mistakes, even at its absolute lowest difficulty. The only change seems to be in its aggressiveness.

If you wonder why I make the remark on psychouts, fakeouts, and so on, chess is a heavily psychological game as played between its masters. Why? Partly because most of them are, pardon my language, completely insane. One chess expert, after losing a game thanks to a stupid mistake, went to a chess parlor and used a meat cleaver to chop off the "heads" of all the queens in the establishment (the piece he moved when he shouldn't have was the queen), and that isn't necessarily the craziest chess story. No, that would be when the inmates from Bedlam's asylum beat an expert university chess team.

Yes. That happened. In real life.

Anyway, in case you were hoping for a visual component to this blog post, here's an embedded YouTube video with a clip based on the old Battle Chess video game (although be warned, there's a rather creepy sequence where the rook eats the queen-yes, eats the queen).



There's also this... less graphically sophisticated version, where if you look closely, you can see one knight dismembering another in similar fashion to the Monty "It's just a flesh wound" Python scene (so people say, anyway-I've never seen that movie myself).



And on a somewhat unrelated note, here's a Battle Chess game based on Chinese "chess."



You notice that one red pawn/peasant type piece? He takes out something like a quarter of the blue pieces unaided. That's kind of funny.

There's also Battle Chess 4000, which is really cartoonily amusing, but I probably shouldn't embed too many videos, and there aren't really any long videos for that one.

-Signing off.