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Joe Joyce wrote on Sat, Nov 22, 2008 12:36 AM UTC:
Thank you for the rating, George. I'm never quite sure what to say when you give me a good rating. [I'm very tempted to say: 'Who are you really, and what have you done with George?' :-)] You've rated and discussed a few of my games now, this one most recently. I'd like to make a few comments, but before I do, I have to ask: is the ZigZag General in this game appropriately named? It is certainly and deliberately a multipath piece. ;-)

Modern Shatranj, Great, Grand, Barroom, and Lemurian Shatranj are a tightly-connected series, each one growing out of the previous one. Obviously, they are what inspired the ShortRange Project. [Oh, yeah, Hypermodern is in there too, right after Modern.] I owe a great debt of gratitude to Christine Bagley-Jones, my collaborator on the ShortRange Project, effectively a co-inventor of Great Shatranj, and an independent designer of Hypermodern Shatranj. I also owe thanks to David Paulowich and Roberto Lavieri  [another independent designer of Hypermodern] for inspiration and encouragement and most of all, fascinating conversations. 

This game does break one of Fergus Duniho's design rules. The queen analog can checkmate the king analog by itself, even though the king can not only step to the adjacent 8 squares, but leap directly over those squares to the 8 directly beyond them. The ZigZag General is far and away the most powerful piece I've ever designed. It moves 4 squares at most, but can reach most squares within 4 and all within 3 squares when it moves, attacking 64 squares. It steps 1 or leaps 2 in any direction, then may step 1 or leap 2 in any direction again. Its restrictions are that it must stop upon capture and that it may not make a null move. 

The ZZG is a combination of the moves of the Twisted and fleXible kNights, the bishop and rook analogs. Interestingly, while each of these latter pieces reaches 32 squares, the ZZG reaches 12 squares more than either other piece could reach by starting on the same square because the TN and the XN overlap squares within 2 of start. 

This makes it more than the queen, which is just the combination of the squares the bishop and rook reach. On an 8x8, from one of the 4 center squares, the ZZG can reach 56 squares, missing only every other square along the 2 farthest board edges. Now the queen gets an extra pawn value for combining the powers of rook and bishop in the same piece, even though it takes no more than either piece could from the same square. What does the ZZG get for the combination and picking up ~21% more squares?

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