Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

@Fergus, HG, Greg

I'm volunteer to write the page for Obento Chess, a game created by Eric Silverman with my cooperation. I have sent you an e-mail about this with a proposal. Please check it out and answer me. Thank you.

I have assigned you as the author of this page. So, you should be able to edit it now. Let me know if you have any trouble with this.

I believe this page is ready for publication now. Eric S has reviewed it too. Tell me if I need to change anything.

I changed the links to Ai Ai to our link page for it, and I changed tens to dozens, as we don't normally speak of tens of something in English, but we will speak of dozens, and the numbers are close enough together that dozens is likely to be true.

However, dozenal is a neologism in this context. On looking up the word, it describes numbers in base 12, which is not what is meant. I would suggest replacing it.

dozenal is a neologism in this context. On looking up the word, it describes numbers in base 12, which is not what is meant

‘Decimal’ is also often used to describe 10×10 variants, even though outwith chess‐variant circles it also seems to refer only to base‐10 numbers. Imo in this context the extension to ‘dozenal’ is reasonably clear

Speaking of neologisms, might it be worth crediting Charles Gilman for the names of the Gold/Silver Pashtuns? They are defined in Long‐Nosed Generals and used in Pashtun Shogi (Though the Silver pashtun predates those names as the Great Elephant of White Elephant Chess). The names of the Riders may or may not also be original to Gilman (M&B 4).

Idk about the other pieces; Marquis seems to be from King's Scirocco, and Caliph is common to both Gilman and John William Brown (in Meta‐Chess); The likes of Snaketongue and Wizard have credits given already

yes dozenal is a neologism, but I wish to keep it here as I have used it before in several of my variants presented in CVP too. We even have a tag called dozenal. OK for the other changes made by Fergus, thanks.

Thanks to Bn for the informations I didn't have on the Pashtuns. I didn't know where Eric had found these names. I have added these credits.

is there anything I should do now for this page?

Thanks to HG who pointed me that Gold and Silver Riders are borrowed from Maka Dai Dai Shogi, as Free Gold and Silver. Something I had lost from sight. Corrected here now.

Obento Chess 960

I presume the name is inspired by the name Chess 960, which is an alternate name for Fisher Random Chess that some people prefer. But the number 960 in this alternate name for Fisher Random Chess is due to the number of different positions possible using the shuffle rules of that game. If you apply the same shuffle rules to a 12x12 game with two rows of non-Pawn pieces for each player, the number will probably be higher than 960. So I don't think Obento Chess 960 is really an appropriate name. It would be better to call it Fisher Random Obento Chess.

Also, it does not appear to be working. It does not shuffle pieces, and it does not show me how any piece moves.

Clicking restart will shuffle the pieces. 960 because it'll only shuffle Bishops, Rooks, Queens, Kings, & Marquis.

@Haru: several BLACK pieces of your "960" implementation do not show up on the diagrams.

So I don't think Obento Chess 960 is really an appropriate name. It would be better to call it Fisher Random Obento Chess.

Considering that the shuffle version of Capablanca Chess is called 'Capablanca Random Chess', it would be in line to call this 'Obento Random Chess'.

Note incidentally that whilst the plated Pashtuns lack any kind of established images, the riders had enchanced R/B images (see top of second diagram) associated to them by Gilman. A matter of taste of course, whether you see them as plated first or riders first. And of course these images haven't been converted to SVG either

@Bn Em: thank you for this indication. For the riders, I prefer those with arrows which are derived from the Gold and Silver G. with 1 point, at least in this Obento C. context. They have been used in AI AI by E Silverman for a long time and are also available in the Musketeer's board painter tool. Same thing for the Pashtuns with 2 points.

Of course, makes sense that Eric would've already been using such images; I haven't got round to trying Ai Ai yet so I hadn't seen them.

Though in any case I should maybe try my hand at doing some of these SVG conversions one of these days; there's still a few images (particularly these and the move‐based Bent Rider ones) that I quite like and haven't yet made it into SVG

@HG: thank you very much for adding the icons I was missing for the ID of Obento. And thanks also to Daniel for their initial design.

The author, Jean-Louis Cazaux, has updated this page.