Gregory Clark wrote on Fri, Jan 3 04:13 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★
Arimaa is a top-tier and elegant game, offering deep strategy and complex tactics via a rule set that is arguably simpler than standard chess. If chess were a sword fight, Arimaa would be a wrestling match.
Chess games start with memorized openings, go through a phase of interesting tactical possibilities, and then become more strategic as pieces come off of the board. Arimaa successfully avoids the need for memorizing openings with the setup moves, and the gameplay transforms in the other direction, starting off more strategic and becoming more tactical as pieces are captured.
Sure, anyone could create a chess variant with a large branching factor by allowing multiple steps per turn. The beauty of what Arimaa achieves is that the branching factor is large (~17k) without bogging down humans. The spacial reasoning needed to prune useless Arimaa steps comes very naturally to humans and less naturally to minimax search algorithms.
Arimaa is a top-tier and elegant game, offering deep strategy and complex tactics via a rule set that is arguably simpler than standard chess. If chess were a sword fight, Arimaa would be a wrestling match.
Chess games start with memorized openings, go through a phase of interesting tactical possibilities, and then become more strategic as pieces come off of the board. Arimaa successfully avoids the need for memorizing openings with the setup moves, and the gameplay transforms in the other direction, starting off more strategic and becoming more tactical as pieces are captured.
Sure, anyone could create a chess variant with a large branching factor by allowing multiple steps per turn. The beauty of what Arimaa achieves is that the branching factor is large (~17k) without bogging down humans. The spacial reasoning needed to prune useless Arimaa steps comes very naturally to humans and less naturally to minimax search algorithms.