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

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Tony Quintanilla wrote on Fri, Aug 27, 2004 04:53 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
I would like to share the following correspondance with Freederick.

On Sat, 21 Aug 2004 Tony Quintanilla wrote :
>...
>Very nice! How did you learn about this game?
>...

Thank you!

I learned about Elephant Hunt secondhand from a francophone friend of mine
in my college years, who had an interest in anthropology.  The notes in
Father Morceau's diary made much ado about the game being played on a
10x10 board; he theorized a lot about the Pygmies either borrowing the
game from a more advanced culture with a base-ten counting system, or
starting with a 5x5 field for the elephant (the Pygmies, it seems, use a
base-five system) from which the 10x10 board arose by subdivision.  All of
this is not germane to the rules of the game, and I don't remember it
well anyway.  The actual rules were given a skimpy and incomplete
treatment in the notes.  The author did mention that the Elephant moved on
the 5x5 field on which the 10x10 field for the Pygmies was 'overlaid by
halving', and that the Pygmies moved 'by hopping about, like our
chess-knight' but I personally doubt they actually made a Knight-move,
which is sort of abstract.  However, other possible alternatives (like D
and/or A) seem to me to be out of the question, as the Pygmies cannot
possibly win if colorbound.  Thus, not having other information, I
implemented them with a Knight-move, which makes for an interesting game. 
The Shaman (witch-doctor, IIRC, was the term employed) was described as
making 'double moves'.  I implemented this as W2F2; it could just as
well be t[NN], or perhaps the move of the Lion in Chu Shogi: t[KK].  These
variants also seem interesting and playable.  Unfortunately I have lost
contact with the friend who provided the information, and I have no idea
of other sources.

Sincerely yours
Freederick

Edit Form

Comment on the page Elephant Hunt

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.