ABSTRACT CHESS

Copyright (c) 2003 João Pedro Neto

This game is played on a 8x8 square board with the following setup:

 

STACK - a stack of one to six regular stones of either color. A royal stone (marked by a point in the diagram) cannot belong to a stack. TURN -  On each turn, each player must do one of the following things: Move a friendly stack. Transfer one regular stone from a stack to an adjacent (orthogonal or diagonal) friendly stack. Capture an enemy stack by replacement (as in chess). MOVE/CAPTURE RANGE - A stack move/capture range depends of its size. A stack of size 1 moves like the chess Pawn (except there's no initial double move, no en-passant and no promotion). A stack of size 2 behaves like the chess Knight. A stack of size 3 behaves like the chess Bishop. A stack of size 4 or 5 behaves like the chess Rook (except there's no castling) A stack of size 6 behaves like the chess Queen. The royal stone behaves like the chess King. GOAL - The winner is whoever captures the royal stone.

The idea of this game is to strip out all the awkward Chess rules, while providing another way to build tension, tactics and overall strategy (using the new transfer mechanism).

An example White's turn. The white King is about to be captured by one of the two white rooks. However, if he transfers one stone from the h6 knight (making a pawn) into the g7 rook (making a queen), the Black King will be captured in the next move.

Read some comments about the game. One from Peter Aronson is especially relevant:

[...] on reflection I find myself wondering if the game doesn't make it too easy to make passive moves. A pair of Knights, for example, could pass back and forth a stone all day without substantially changing the board position. I wonder if a two move approach, as used in many of Ralph's recent board connecting games might be better. Each player would have two moves a turn: the first is obligatory, and requires moving a stack from one space to another; the second is optional, and consists of moving a stone from one stack to another. Or alternately, maybe a player could be forbidden to make two transfers in a row. Another issue (and this one was illuminated both by Zillions' play and John's earlier comments) is that the relation between the number of stones in a stack and the power of a stack is very irregular. Two stones are much more powerful than one stone, but three stones are hardly any stronger than two, while four stones are a fair bit stronger than three, and five stones are no stronger than four and six stones are much stronger than five. I wonder about this approach:

# of Stones	Piece Type
1	Pawn (mfWcfF)
2	Mao
3	Bishop
4	Rook
5	Cardinal
6	Queen

The Mao is the XiangQi Knight: it does not jump, it moves one step orthogonally and then one step diagonally away.
The Cardinal is the Bishop plus Knight.

There are two ZRFs to play the game: one by L. Lynn Smith with stack oriented visual, and another by Peter Aronson more chess like.