SPACE SHOGI

 

Back in the 1980’s I invented a Shogi variant which transported the Shogi pieces to a 3-D board. The game was described somewhat inaccurately in Michael Keller’s World Game Review. I take full responsibility for the inaccuracy, blaming it on my poor effort to communicate the game to Keller.

 

The game is now on Wikipedia, using Keller’s description. I recently got a communication pointing out that the pieces were too lonely on a 9x9x9 playing field. I agree. I never meant for the game to be played on such a large field. It is now time for me to clear up the inaccuracies.

 

Space Shogi should be played on a field consisting of 81 cubes arranged 3x3x9. Think of the field as consisting of a row of three cubes, each one subdivided into nine smaller cubes. White occupies the 3x3x3 cube on one end of the field, and Black occupies the cube on the other side of the field. The middle cube is vacant.

 

The pieces are identical to those of orthodox Shogi, and their moves are extended to the third dimension. They are:

 

All the rules of orthodox Shogi apply, including captures, drops, and promotion of the pieces. The array is shown below, as are diagrams of the moves of the pieces.

VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF CHESS

 I have been a chess aficionado since I was in the first grade, and once upon a time I was a fair player, going 2-2-2 in my first chess tournament, the 1980 Florida State Chess Championship. After a while playing tournament chess, I gravitated toward postal chess, and then my passion for the game dried up. It's been years since I played the game, but I still have a collection of some 40-50 chess sets.

In college I got interested in chess variants. I have collected rulesheets for some 200-250 variations on the theme of chess, and I have invented more than a dozen chess variants myself. I must confess that I was more concerned with how the variants looked than how well they played, but I think that some of my variants are very playable.

Which brings me to my latest venture in self-publishing: Variations on the Theme of Chess, available in Kindle and paperback from Amazon. A significant number of the games described in the book are games I invented or modified. 

Games like Chesquerque:

And Cross Chess:

And Hexagonal Shogi:

And Hexagonal Xiangqi (Chinese Chess):

I think any of these games I have illustrated are very playable. 

In addition to my own inventions, I have included descriptions of some ancient and exotic chess variants.

Games like the Prussian National Game: ( In the diagrams below, the empty ranks are omitted)

And Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Chess: 

And Tamerlane's Chess: 

I have included some old, established variants.

Like Capablanca's Chess: 

And Courier Chess:

And I have even included some variants which are almost, but not quite Chess.

Like George Parker's Camelot:

And Gala, a game played long ago in Germany:

And one of my favorite not-quite Chess games, Cheskers:

If you like chess variants, you'll probably find one to suit your taste in Variations on the Theme of Chess.

CHESSGI: A HYBRID OF WESTERN CHESS AND JAPANESE CHESS

According to the conventional wisdom, there are two types of chess players who like to play so-called chess variants (games of chess in which the normal rules have been altered in some way)—those who are very good at chess, like world champion Jose Raul Capablanca (who invented a chess variant), and those who are not very good at chess, like me (who invented several chess variants). There are thousands of chess variants, and most of them are very bad. Some, however, are very good. Shogi, or Japanese Chess, is an excellent game in its own right, and it is very different from Western Chess, with its flat, pointed pieces which can be parachuted back onto the board if they are captured. The pieces look like little boats or little arrowheads, and although the sides are called black and white as in Western Chess, the pieces are all the same color. You can tell which player has a piece by which way the piece is pointing.

One of my favorite chess variants is a game which is known by several different names—Neo-Chess, Drop Chess, Mad Mate, Reinforcement Chess, Turnabout Chess, Schizo Chess, and Chessgi. The game has been invented and re-invented several times, with the earliest incarnation of the game appearing in 1827 and the latest (Neo-Chess) being invented by Alex Randolph in 1972. It was supposedly re-invented under the name of Chessgi in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s by a group of college students who wanted to play Shogi but couldn’t find a Shogi set.

The name Chessgi is the most descriptive of all the names that the game has gone under. If you know the rules of Chess, the rules of Chessgi are simple. Chessgi is played exactly like Chess with the addition of the following rules: (1) A captured piece becomes the property of the player capturing it and may be parachuted back onto the board in a subsequent move. (2) If a captured piece is parachuted onto the board, no piece on the board can be moved. (3) A pawn cannot be parachuted onto the back row where it cannot move. (4) If a piece which has promoted from a pawn is captured, it does not lose its promoted rank.

Playing the game is cumbersome. You need at least two sets so that a captured piece can be replace it with a piece of the captor’s color before being parachuted back onto the board. You need a flow chart to keep up with what’s been captured and who has captured it. Neo-Chess, which is a proprietary game, solved the problem by replacing the pieces with cylinders. On one end of the cylinders would be the symbols for the pieces in one color and on the other end would be the symbols for the pieces in the other color. When a piece was captured, the captor could simply turn it over. Neo-Chess is no longer on the market, but you can occasionally find a used set on ebay.

I don’t know when I first became aware of Chessgi. I think it was shortly after I joined The Knights of the Square Table (NOST), a now-defunct postal chess club. When I read about the game in the pages of the NOST newsletter, I wanted to play it, but I didn’t want to fool around with two chess sets  and I had never heard of Neo-Chess. I had already made myself a Shogi set, so I decided to make a Chessgi set.

I had previously made a Shogi set using directions I found in a library book, so I decided to make my Chessgi set exactly as I had made my first Shogi set. Cutting out the little pointed pieces was easy. The hard part was figuring out how to put the symbols on them. When I made my Shogi set, I used a stencil to put the initials of the pieces on the wooden shapes, but I wanted real Chess symbols on the Chessgi pieces. Having no Chess stencil and no artistic talent, I decided to photocopy drawings of the pieces and glue them on the wooden arrowheads. I had black symbols on one side and white symbols on the other so that the pieces could be flipped over as in Neo-Chess, but I soon discovered that I only needed one color because it was easy to distinguish the sides by the way the pieces pointed. We’ve moved twice since I made that Chessgi set, and I have no idea where it is. 

Recently I got in the mood to play some Chessgi, so I made another set. This time I used a chess figurine stencil from Amazon.com to put the symbols on the pieces. Although it wasn’t necessary, I put black symbols on one side of the pieces and red symbols on the other. The set looks like this:

Now if I can just find someone to play against.