Check out Atomic Chess, our featured variant for November, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Mar 11, 2015 10:34 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
The description in the linked page basically follows the rules from the TSA leaflet. But progressive insight due to easier contact with people in Japan through the internet has led to substantial revising of the rules, and the current Wikipedia description of this game differs in several important respects from the TSA rules. For instance:

The Lion Dog is now thought to have 3-step linear Lion powers, similar (but greater than) the 2-step linear Lion power of Horned Falcon and Soaring Eagle in Chu Shogi. That it should not have Lion power was argued in the TSA leaflet apparently on no other basis than that 3-step full (i.e. direction-changing) Lion power would make it much to strong, but the restriction to linear movement that voids this arguments was never considered.

It is now considered unlikely that promotion (on capture) was mandatory. Unlike Dai Dai Shogi, where most pieces do not promote (or start out promoted, if you want), having forced promotion in Maka Dai Dai would thoroughly wreck the game. Many of the strong pieces 'promote' to the weak Gold, (hook movers, Lion Dog), and there are no pieces in the initial setup that would promote to any of these lost pieces. So you would quickly end up in a situation with flocks of Golds, plus some rather uninteresting sliders. A much better rule would be that promotion is mandatory only when you capture a promoted piece, and optional when you capture an unpromoted one. That would preserve the interesting pieces much longer. The idea that you would 'inherit' the promoted property from you victim is in line with the following rule as well:

The strongest pieces of the game, Teaching King and Buddhist Spirit (compounds of Queen + Lion Dog and Queen + Lion) cannot be traded out of the game, by a rule different from the Lion-trading rules in Chu, but practically achieving the same: whenever you capture a TK or BS, the capturing piece promotes to that. (Using the just captured piece to replace it.)

This makes the game much more interesting than once thought. The major drawback remains the very large size, which makes it tedious to play. I designed a version of it about half the size, on a 13x13 board: "Macadamia Shogi", on which I posted a page here.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Maka-Dai-Dai Shogi

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Avoid Inflammatory Comments
If you are feeling anger, keep it to yourself until you calm down. Avoid insulting, blaming, or attacking someone you are angry with. Focus criticisms on ideas rather than people, and understand that criticisms of your ideas are not personal attacks and do not justify an inflammatory response.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.