Weird, cool, and familiar, the family tree of chess is delightful to explore
Become a patreon and help me pay a psychiatrist to tell me what’s wrong with me: patreon.com/HighlyEntropicMind
History of Chess Variants
Weird, cool, and familiar, the family tree of chess is delightful to explore
Become a patreon and help me pay a psychiatrist to tell me what’s wrong with me: patreon.com/HighlyEntropicMind
DISLIKE. This is the official dislike comment. LIKE this comment to indicate you DISLIKE this video. Also, since this is my video I can see the dislikes, last time I updated this comment it was: 12 dislikes
Nice Video. I have a channel dedicated to Tamerlane Chess.
Apparently, the Timurid empire was only Timur the Lames side hustle
India Chess: Old Chess
Tamerlane Chess: Big chess
Chinese Chess: Geography Chess
Shogi: Promotion Chess
European Chess: Fast Chess
If you think Dai Shogi has many pieces, then try Taikyoku Shogi. A 36×36 board, 1,296 squares, each player has 402 pieces of 207 different types, including your favorite drunken elephant, and with 253 sets of moves to remember, there are no drops and you have to capture the opponent's king(s) AND prince(s) to win.
Have you ever heard of taikoyu shogi? The board's size is 600*600!!!
3:58 in spanish we still call that pice "alfil" which has something to do with the word "elefante" (from what I understand). Calling them bishops has more to do with the translation and catholicism, since the top of the pice resembles something like the hat of a bishop.
As a game designer… Note to self: In game, include drunken elephant.
Promotion is rare, but it is still an absolutely critical part of the game, even when it doesn't wind up happening at all. Just the potential itself of the pawn to eventually become a Queen affects the way you assess the threat of a pawn. Many games come down to how many pawns you have when entering the end-game, their advancement, whether they are passed pawns, isolated pawns, defended etc. determines their value and power.
The Western chess is very well balanced aesthetically.
The occupied squares are balanced against the unoccupied squares.
The weakest piece, the pawn, is balanced with the strongest piece, the queen. The pawn can promote to queen.
The king is balanced with the queen.
The rook is balanced against the bishop. The rook controls the orthogonal, the bishop controls the diagonals.
The queen is balanced by the rook and bishop. The queen is balanced by the knight. Where the knight can go the queen cannot go.
Black bishops are balanced by white bishops.
Bishops are balanced by knights. Knight change colors every time it moves.
The elephant moves like the elephant in Chinese Chess, 2 squares diagonally, basically.
Chinese Chess is closer to its parent Indian chess than Western Chess.
I think that chess should be a bi-athlon. 5 games of Western chess, and 5 games of Chinese chess for the World Bi-athlon Chess championship.
The rules you don't like in one game is in the other game, and vice versa.
You really have the best of both worlds.
My invention, in my head. Biathlon Chess. Western and Chinese.
@8:07 Sounds like Timurs Chess was so complicated the ONLY TIMUR COULD HAVE KNOWN ALL THE RULES!!! A tyrant likes to always win… IMHO
Bishops are called elephants in some languages, Russian for example
I liked your video. Enjoyed your enthusiasm! You did ask at the end of the video to mention any chess variant that you may have missed. Well, you missed SENTEREJ (commonly called Ethiopian Chess). Since you liked the opening movies for SITTUYIN, I thought you'd love the opening moves for SENTEREJ !
I was under the impression that dai shogi came before shogi not the other way around
I think a video about modern variants would be very cool! 🙂
Shogi is a very elegant chess variant that's far less abstract, in many ways its superior to western Chess.
shogi
I don’t think you have addressed the cannon in XiangQi. It moves like a rook but it has to jump over a piece to capture another piece on the same row/column.
I have a version it isn't overwhelmingly high change and not a eye rollably low change
The bishop of modern Western chess is still called "elephant" in Russian. Shōgi probably got the idea for promoting on the 6th rank from Ouk chatrang (Cambodia) or Makruk (Thailand).
Shadyantra was invented in India and Shri Lanka because Shri Lanka was part of india 8800 yrs back. Initially it was named as Dhyut. Shadyantra is based on 10×10 board called Dashpaad. Chaturanga was evolved from Shadyantra in 200 BC after it was latter was banned. And yes Chaturanga was played on 8×8 board..
I would love to see a "world tour chess" tournament where people play each one of these games against each other. When two people face off, they have to play a round of western chess, chinese chess, etc and the winner is whoever wins the most games in a given match up. I wouldn't include the larger versions of shogi, though, as it would probably take too much time 😂. Thanks for the video
You should check out Congo. The pawns promote after crossing "river" in the middle. There's also a piece that moves like a king, but when in the river it moves like a rook.
How did you gloss over the most modern piece in Xiangqi, le kanon.
Premotion in chess might not see frequently, but a lot of time they use the premotion as threatens. I see that's fascinating concept of chess premotion.
Of course chaturaji is classified as a chaturanga variant, why would you say it isn't related to chess
i have weak chess
21:14 Actually, there are some cases when you should promote to a rook, because queen leads to immediate stalemate and knight is not enought to mate with. Also there are many cases when promoting to rook (or to bishop) is same immediate check-mate as promoting to a queen, so that you could feel proud that you were able to check-mate your opponent without making a new queen.
Chess didn't shake up the mechanics of promoting, but changed the feeling. Promoting to an advisor is lackluster since they're a weaker king, but pawn->queen is a badass feeling
I’m surprised that you didn’t mention the cannon in Xiangqi (pronounced closer to Syiang Chi). It changes everything!
If you liked Shogi and Dai Shogi, you're going to love Taikyoku Shogi.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taikyoku_shogi