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Xorix Shogi. Shogi where piece movement are XORed with captured pieces. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Fri, Jan 20, 2006 10:47 PM UTC:

There are two ways of interpreting the rules for this game. I think I know
which interpretation is correct, but it should be clarified. On one
interpretation, the powers of the captured piece are taken as those it
will have when it gets dropped by the player who captured it. On this
interpretation, a Pawn that captures another Pawn does not change its
powers of movement, a Rook that captures a Lance loses the ability to ride
forward, and a Gold General that captures a Silver General will move as a
Gold General in reverse. On the other interpretation, the powers of the
captured piece are taken as those it has prior to capture. On this
interpretation, a Pawn that captures another Pawn can now move one space
forward or backward, a Rook that captures a Lance loses the ability to
move backward, and a Gold General that captures a Silver General can move
diagonally backward, horizontally, or vertically forward.

I think the first interpretation is the correct one. The text mentions
putting the piece in hand (what it calls putting it on your bench) before
it mentions XORing the two pieces together. This interpretation also has
the advantage of requiring fewer different types of pieces. I think it
requires something on the order of 256 separate piece types, and the
second interpretation requires something on the order of 2048 separate
piece types. This assumes that I've counted the basic types of movement
accurately. The actual figures will be a bit less, since some
combinations, such as a Lance that can't move one space forward, won't
be included. But they are still high.

Making this into a ZRF or Game Courier preset would be long, tedious work.
Since neither ZRF nor GAME Code has the ability to XOR powers of movement,
each possible capture would have to be separately coded. I'm not
interested in taking the time to do this myself. But what I could do, if
someone else is interested in doing the rest, is to supply a set of
graphics. I can do this by writing a PHP script that automatically
generates diagrammatic pieces by coloring different sections of a standard
template. Maybe it could also mark the pieces with Betza's funny notation.