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. Mongolian Great Chess played on a 10x10 board with a pair of Bodyguard pieces per side.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Ed wrote on Tue, Mar 27, 2012 08:32 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★

@Mats: I have enjoyed your ZRF very much for a while.  Without wishing to
sound ungrateful for your effort, which I most certainly esteem, if there
would be one thing that I might change about it (for aesthetic purposes
only, to be sure, and for some kind of nod to the exotic origin of the
game), it would be to use graphics like those in diagrams in native shatar
literature, at least as an option.  One would still have to produce a
suitable graphic for the hia, though, and the representation of the king as
a palace or pagoda was a bit surprising for me at first when I saw it.  I
would provide images to illustrate, but the books I consulted were part of
a library collection of Mongolian materials.  These books were printed in
Inner Mongolia, so I have no way of verifying that the practice holds in
the Republic of Mongolia or Tuva.

For a while I had hoped to be able to submit details about other large
shatar variants that seem to have been played historically in Mongolia.  My
correspondent from Ulaanbaatar tantalized me by mentioning 9x9, 10x10
(hiashatar), 11x11, and 12x12 board sizes, but made no mention of the
pieces populating the board or powers they possess.

As to hiashatar, I was hoping to have more information from my
correspondent to resolve what seems the variability in the moves reported
for the hia.  I hope that an English-speaking Mongolian (or Chinese with
access to fuller information in authoritative sources) might read this and
supply us with more detail.