JCRuhf wrote on Thu, Jul 17, 2008 09:35 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
I like this game very much, but I would not have limited the pawn promotion
so much had I created it. The first thing I would do if I were
transliterating Chaturanga/Shatranj to a quasi-pentagonal board would be
to keep the basic pawn promotion rule from the original game intact
instead of discarding it altogether and then add the piece that starts on
or directly in front of that cell to the promotion options. In the event
that a Pawn landed where the opponent's Adviser/Counselor started, it
would be able to promote to any piece other than the king. That gripe
aside, the game is a very good quasi-pentagonal version of chess. However,
there is no rating between Good and Excellent and I could not really give
an Excellent rating the game is not completely faithful to its historical
original with regards to Pawn promotion.
P.S. I am referring to the board as quasi-pentagonal because a true
pentagonal board is a tessellation of pentagons that does not involve
pushing small groups of them together into shapes other than pentagons and
I did not call it hexagonal as that would imply that it was nothing more
than a hexagonal grid.