Talk:Fairy chess piece
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You call the fers a (1,1) leaper. I'm not familiar with shatranj, but wouldn't that just mean one diagonal in any direction? Doesn't seem like "leaping". -- goatasaur
- Yes, it does mean one diagonal in any direction. A "leaper" doesn't necessarily "leap" over intervening squares or pieces - it's just a technical term to distinguish it from riders and hoppers. In this case, it emphasises the fact that kings, wazirs and fers are in the same class as knights, dabbabbas and commuters (inasmuch as they move a fixed distance from one corner of a rectangle or square to the opposite corner). I've added simpler explanations of the moves of the fers, king and wazir to the page now. --Camembert
It's a bit weird to call a piece that moves only 1 square a "leaper". It's what we mathematicians call a degenerate case. Are leapers always commutative? ie, could a leaper be (2,1) but NOT (1,2)? Does the notation for leapers always imply the numbers can be reversed? -- Tarquin 17:53 25 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- OK, I'll change the wording so that the simpler explanation comes first and the "(1,1) leaper" (or whatever) comes later. On the other point: yes, the implication is that the numbers can be reversed (I've seen the knight described as a (1,2) leaper on many occasions). I suppose it would be possible to have a (2,1) leaper that could go two-accross, one-up, but not the other way round - I don't know of any examples of such pieces being used either in games or problems, however. I'll try to clarify this in the text. --Camembert
Thanks! Great article! -- Tarquin 20:46 25 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- Thanks tarq - and thanks to all for helping to improve it :) --Camembert
What about the cannon from Chinese Chess (moves like a rook; captures by jumping over a single piece (friendly or enemy))? I thought that there were a lot of nonstandard pieces that had different movement rules and capturing rules? Shouldn't they be listed here?
- The cannon from xiangqi, in my experience, is normally called a pao in the context of chess variants played on a chessboard (as opposed to the context of xiangqi, when the name is usually translated). I'll add a cross-reference.
- This isn't an exhaustive list by any means - of course there's a lot of other pieces that can be added. If you can add things, please do. There are already various pieces that capture different to how they move, however - the pao, vao, mao and leo are all listed. --Camembert
As a general note: I've written this with reference to fairly scattered sources, and I'm not an expert, so it's possible quite a few things aren't clear (or even just wrong). If so, do point them out. --Camembert
About this:
- Zag-Zag: a piece which can move vertically or along the NE-SW diagonal.
and all the other zigs and zags: the descriptions are too vague, as they don't say how far these pieces can move. Can they move any distance (like riders) or is it just one square (or some other number of squres) in the direction indicated (like leapers)? I'd like to fix the article, but I don't think I've ever come across these pieces myself. --Camembert
These 4 pieces are capable of straightline movements on geometrically-contiguous square spaces of unlimited range. In other words, they are all riders. Sorry, I neglected to be explicit. Without vigilance, familiarity breeds vagueness. Fergus Duniho at the Chess Variant Pages told me he has never seen this class of pieces used anywhere except within several of the games comprising the Symmetrical Chess Collection. Please check it out. --OmegaMan
Someone has established a convention on Wikipedia of describing piece movements upon 2-dimensional gameboards via a pair of positive integer coordinates. To be sure, this is decently clear and accurate. However, it should be noted (yet is not) that this system is implicitly being applied to square-spaced gameboards.
Although geometrically-contiguous square-spaced gameboards so based are by far the most prevalent, chess variants have been invented which play upon geometrically-contiguous gameboards which are triangle-spaced and hexagon-spaced as well.
I do not wish to clutter-up a concise, understandable description by fully explaining all of this yet I feel it should be mentioned somewhere. So, I would value the advice of an experienced editor on this point. --OmegaMan
- I don't really have much experience of non-square-spaced boards (I'm not even sure whether I would call games using other types of spaces "fairy chess" games at all, rather than just "board games", but maybe that's just me). I hope we won't scrap the (1,2) type notation, since, as you say, it's easy to understand, but of course, if you want to write a bit about other shaped-spaces, go ahead. --Camembert
The article claims it's going to explain "Chinese pieces" at one point, but never defines this term.
- Yes it does, in the list near the end: "Chinese pieces: a collective name for pieces derived from units found in xiangqi, the Chinese form of chess. The most common Chinese pieces are the leo, pao...". --Camembert
The kraken and universal leaper can 'teleport' anywhere? Does that mean they can capture whatever they want on any move? How is that useful, as it gives a first-move checkmate? Radiant_* 12:05, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)
- Only when the pieces are used with certain rule-sets. In orthodox chess, and many other forms of chess, such pieces would, of course, be unusable, but with certain esoteric rule-sets or problem stipulations, they can have a purpose (for example, the problem may be to get a line-piece to a certain square, with the kraken attempting to intervene to stop it). --Camembert