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Play Chess Variants with Jocly. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Wed, Feb 14, 2024 07:52 AM UTC in reply to François Houdebert from Tue Feb 13 05:43 PM:

While I was at it, I thought I might as well extend the tenjiku sprites with the the pieces for Tenjiku Shogi. My first attempt is here. The Wolf and Bull are good enough for Dog and Water Buffalo, the Griffon seems a logical choice for Lion Hawk. I used a Star for the Free Eagle, which moves as Queen with some close-range locust capture, in the hope that a star would cause the association with 'all directions'.

I am least happy with the various kinds of Soldiers. I represented the Chariot Soldier by a Cannon, because it is also associated with war, and has wheels. For the Vertical and Side Soldier I picked two warrior helmets, but there is no vertical or sideway aspect to those. Perhaps they should be represented by Bows in two different orientations? Then all Soldiers would be represented by shooting equipment.

I also included sprites for the not-yet-implemented Dai Shogi (the third shogi variant strongly related to Chu Shogi). The Wolf can be used there for Evil Wolf, (There is no Dog there), and I left in the Wazir, Ferz and small Bishop and Rook sprites for representing Angry Boar, Cat Sword, Flying Dragon, and Violent Ox (since the latter two are B2 and R2); it seems better to represent these by move than by name. That only leaves the Stone, General, for which there unfortunally is no logical continuation of the Generals series. So I took the Scout symbol for that. We can worry about this more when we would actually implement Dai Shogi.

[Edit] Strange thing: when I was trying it out it appeared to have lost its opening book, and I got error messages in the console about requesting Zobrist keys for invalid board squares. This turned out to be associated with this strange mode Jocly sometimes gets in, where white is at the far end of the board despite "View as player A" having been selected, but the white pieces still all look away from you, and thus have the wrong orientation w.r.t. the board. I usually solve that by firest viewing as player B, and then again as A. This then also granted it access to its book again.