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Oops, you are right! Indeed I had these in an earlier version, but the board filling fraction was then higher than that of Maka Dai Dai Shogi. And it seemed to me that the Leopards were the least essential. At first I also had used the Chinese Cock and Blind Monkey instead of Kirin and Phoenix as representatives for the asymmetric pairs of pieces, but in the end favored the latter, because they have more interesting promotions (to pieces that have range-2 and range-3 moves, in stead of just steps and slides). I will fix the diagram.

And thank you for your appreciation. But I should stress that almost all credit should of course go to the Buddhist monks that designed Maka Dai Dai Shogi in the 15th century.

I can't get the wolf to move to the third square cpaturing both the pieces on square 1 and 2.

> I can't get the wolf to move to the third square cpaturing both the pieces on square 1 and 2.

Good observation! The JavaScript code that powers the interactive diagram currently cannot handle more than a single locust-capture victim. (I still have to work on that; I still regularly make improvements to that code to enhance its abilities. Pieces that fly over arbitrarily many others, like the Tenjiku Shogi Great General, are also still on the to-do list.) Currently the moves are internally encoded by 3 squares and a final piece type: the square between which the piece moves (with possibly replacement capture as a consequence), plus one 'e.p. square' that must be evacuated as a side effect of the move. I will have to add a second e.p. square to the move encoding, and modify the move-entry procedure to allow the user to specify it. The latest WinBoard/XBoard version is already adapted to allow that.

Thank you for clarifying. Also, what is the image name for the kirin? I've tried "kirin", as well as "goat", which is an alternate name. My version lacks a kirin, but I would like to use the image for a different piece, which moves one square and is called a guard. I know you have an image for the "prince" or "commoner", which moves the same, but the image looks like a bell, which I don't like. The name of the guardian image would help as well.

You mean the star pictogram, in the Design Wizzard? Its root name is 'marshall'. The roofed simplified rook is 'crownedrook2'.

The symbol XBoard uses for the Commoner/Man is supposed to be a spiked helmet. Apparently my drawing talents are wanting.

'Goat' is from 'Scirocco', right? I think this is a brilliant and highly unerrated game. But then again, I like Chu Shogi...

The written description says that the capricorner can reach any square of its color on an empty board, but the move diagrams says that it cannot. Same with the hook mover.

Also I think you have described the lance twice once by itself, and another time before when writting (L/R Chariot)

It seems I had broken something in the diagram script. Or rather, the changes for the new highlighting method activated a latent bug in the move generation. The diagram stores both pieces and highlight indicators in a board cell. But when testing whether the first leg of a hook mover has bumped into something, it was not ignoring the highlight indications. And because the Hook mover is RmasR, the squares over which the first leg of the hook move goes would already have been highlighted by the plain R component. Before I did not mark squares for normal moves or captures (just those that were targets lof locust captures, e.p. capture or castling), but I started doing that for resolving collisions between such moves and normal moves, to avoid they would eclipse each other in the move diagrams, and to make enforcement of legality possible. The problem would have manifested itself before if a hook move tried to go over an e.p. or locust-capture square, but of course no one ever conceived a piece that combined such moves.

I now fixed this by ignoring the highlight markers when testing whether the first leg is obstructed or can continue. (Flush browser cache!) Thanks for finding and reporting this.

@Aurelian: Not sure what you mean about the Lance. Is that in the piece lists next to the diagram, or in the piece table? I only see one Lance in either case.

@HG

I meant in the article, where you describe the promotions under rules section, I wasn't very clear, I apoligize for that :(!

L/R Chariot there means Left Chariot or Right Chariot. Not Lance or Reverse Chariot.

Ok, my bad :)! Sorry for the misunderstanding :(! I usually don't like just writting initials because it leads to these kind of confusion though :(!

In the rules, it states, "If it captures both Saint (Priest) and Ghost (Pirate) in one turn, it promotes to the one that was farthest away from it." in the section about the Wolf and Saint, but the diagram seems to always just promote a Wolf corresponding to the one it captured second.

Also, the Elephant doesn't have the option to defer promotion when capturing the Capricorner. I don't know why anyone would want to defer promotion in this particular case, but it seems to be allowed in the rules.

Thank you for pointing this out. The rule for double capture that is generally assumend for Maka Dai Dai Shogi is that you would promote to the last one you capture of Saint and Ghost. The chairman of the Japanese Chu-Shogi association insisted that for a 2-out-1-in move it would be illegal to take the 2-out as a jump, so that you always have to capture the nearest piece first. In that case the rule becomes equivalent to what I wrote it in the article. The special script I embedded in this page to handle the promotions uses the original rule, deciding on sequence rather than distance.

But it seems I specified the Wolf's move in XBetza so that 2-out-1-in does jump 2-out first. Since this seems a "never happens" case, I did not pay much attention to it. ANy rule about it is made up in modern times, as the monks who conceived Maka Dai Dai Shogi did not specify any rule for it: they were sensible people, and did not address situations they knew would never happen in practice.

As to the Elephant promotion: this appears to be a consequence to the way I programmed the immunity to contageon for the royal pieces: I always force those to promote to their own promoted form, irrespective of what they capture, and this also suppressed the ability to defer promotion. Like you say, there never is any reason to defer, so I did not worry about this.

What worries me more is that the Elephant is considered a royal piece in this context. Because it really isn't, and if you can promote it you should have another royal already (or you would already have lost the game). I would certainly not prefer to have a second King in that case over having a piece as strong as a Saint or Ghost. Perhaps unless my other King is in checkmate and cannot escape capture on the next move. But even then, the newly acquired King would find itself in the front line where captures are going on, so the chances it will survive the next few moves seem dismal. So I think this is a rather non-sensical exemption, and wonder if it would not be better to drop that rule altogether.

In my play against the diagram, I did come across a different situation in which one might want to promote an Elephant to a King instead of a Saint or Ghost. This occurs when one wants to deny the opponent the opportunity to get the Saint or Ghost by re-capturing. The diagram used this ability of the Elephant to prevent me from getting a Saint, and that actually saved it from almost certain defeat, though I doubt the diagram would have let that situation arise if Elephants didn't have this ability. Still, I completely didn't see it coming and went on to lose the game.

Good point. Strong promotion  is only useful when the piece survives, especially when any capturer would derive new rights from it. Similarly it sometimes pays to 'promote' to an inferior piece, because that would force the recapturer to demote even more,  possibly deterring the recapture altogether.

So I guess that making the Elephant immune to the contageon provides an interesting new twist to the tactics in this game, even apart from the promotion piece being royal.

Macadamia Shogi is, by a hefty margin, my favourite Shogi variant of the larger boards to date. Maka Dai Dai was previously the most enjoyable to me, but 400 moves later I'm stil in the middle game and it feels more like committing to a project than playing a game. Macadamia Shogi really helps alleviate this without detracting too much from the main points of appeal of Maka Dai Dai in my opinion. My heartfelt thanks to H. G. Muller for assembling this variant!

I also root for his success with the C localserver project if it still considered in the pipeline.

Admittedly, the main purpose for my comment to this page though would actually be to raise awareness--if it weren't already known--that the kanji character piece set for the js board on this website has sadly seemed to have broken partially, as a few of the pieces may be missing links now, or at least otherwise aren't loading on multiple browsers I've tested with. I was hoping that these could be potentially restored, as they were a much preferred visual setting.

Anyway, thanks again for all the hard work you've done for chess variants and the like, and I wish you good luck with the future endeavours!!

Thank you for your kind words. I also count Macadamia Shogi as one of the best variants amongst my designs. But of course almost all the credit for that should come from Maka Dai Dai Shogi having such unique and interesting rules; all I did was throw stuff out...

It appears the missing kanji tiles were never made. And probably for a reason: the tiles representation uses the Chu-Shogi 1-kanji set, and in most cases I would be at a loss what kanji to pick for the missing tiles. E.g. in the case of Free Gold both the kanji for Free and for Gold are already in use (for Free King and Gold General, respectively). I suppose one could argue that a red Gold would do, because there isn't any piece that would promote to a normal Gold General. The 'Tiles-1' set in the Maka Dai Dai Shogi article suffers from the same problem; only the 'Tiles-2' button produces a reasonably complete set of kanji pieces.

What I did now is copy the 2-kanji pieces from the Maka Dai Dai set to the Chu Shogi set, so that we now have a mixed 1-kanji/2-kanji set for Macadamia Shogi there.

The Emperor is still missing in all sets, though. It required 4 kanji to spell the name of this piece, and I could not fit that on the tiles. So I am not sure how I should make one.

I had to pause the work on the C version of the Interactive Diagram due to other pressing business, but I certainly plan to resume it.

I'm glad that you will continue the C project for the Interactive diagram. Good luck with that!