Check out Modern Chess, our featured variant for January, 2025.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Wed, Feb 28, 2024 02:57 PM UTC in reply to H. G. Muller from 08:09 AM:

It went more quickly with Alfaerie, because it's easier to spot differences in color than differences in orientation. However, while doing it with Alfaerie, I was not taking any time to get any sense of the position, yet I would certainly have to do that if I were playing Shogi. Also, Shogi does not progress from one random position to another. The position changes incrementally, starting from a position where I already know where everything is without even looking at it. So, I would be able to use my knowledge of previous positions to understand what the slightly new position is.

There are only two cases where I might need more time to figure out what the position is. One is when I am doing problems instead of playing a game, and the other is when an opponent has taken a long time to move in a correspondence game, and the position is no longer fresh in my mind. In each of these two cases, though, I would have time to examine the position.

Using Kanji pieces, I can sometimes not be aware of what every piece is, but I am aware of what each piece is with the Motif pieces, and in actual play, I have not had any problem telling my pieces from my opponent's.

So I do not expect that using differently colored pieces instead of differently oriented pieces would seriously improve my ability to understand positions while actually playing Shogi. And if there is any performance improvement to be gained, it remains less than the performance improvement gained from using pieces I can easily recognize.

Additionally, using wedge-shaped pieces adds some authenticity to the experience of playing Shogi, sort of like watching anime with subtitles over the original audio instead of dubs in my own language, and it allows the use of color for distinguishing between promoted and unpromoted pieces. By not using color to distinguish them, the Alfaerie set makes it harder to spot promoted pieces. So, if you made a similar test for spotting promoted pieces, Motif would do much better than Alfaerie.


Edit Form

Comment on the page Play Chess Variants with Jocly

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.