6 ms·

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable

by zests 5y ago

I love ancient board games. It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. The game has since been stable for about 500. The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants (Fischer random, no castle chess) as our understanding of the game evolves.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants… It’s going to be fascinating to see. I can imagine games getting “frozen” with hard coded rules and clear Official Rules too. I expect that to happen to word spellings, for example, with most everything we write having a layer of autocorrect in the loop. Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant. Or go the other way, as low-/no-code customization tools and online distribution make it easier to make and share variants than it is to do so at any scale with physical games, subject to the openness (both in design and social factors like IP status) of the base game.
zentiggr 5y ago
I love the idea of "Bad Chess"... such a wild concept on top of an otherwise very structured ruleset.
- goblinux 5y ago
  Very Bad Chess by Zach Gage is the best I’ve seen of this. It’s on the iOS App Store, might be on google play. Worth a look if you like “bad chess”
btilly 5y ago
It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark example, the queen did not get her modern move until around 1450. The game has since been stable for about 500. And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first suggested in 1857.
- lupire 5y ago
  "white moves first" is an arbitrary/aesthetic/logistic choice, that doesn't affect gameplay logic. Left-handed players may prefer Black goes first.
- QuercusMax 5y ago
  Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though? It's just a convention.
  - rodrigosetti 5y ago
    Yes, if our definition of "game" is broadened to mean "culture" around this tradition (as historians might), rather than just reducing to the rules. In this sense, it also includes the conventions, skill-level titles, playing etiquette, etc.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though? Materially, no, though it probably makes it less complex for humans by slightly simplifying the pattern recognition issues, particularly in the opening.
  - dvirsky 5y ago
    Statistically, white wins more than black.
    - Jtsummers 5y ago
      Because white goes first. The phrasing and context becomes important. There are two statements that are true but without them as context you end up with a misleading notion: First player wins more than second in chess (because there's a slight advantage). White goes first in chess. Therefore, white wins more than black in chess. However, that conclusion (what you present) is valueless without the context. If you reversed which color starts the game then we'd end up with "black wins more than white in Chess" as a conclusion and your statement would be false. And if there was no specific color which always started, we'd be left with just the first statement: First player wins more than second in chess.
legitster 5y ago
Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in games. He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game. But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictability is important to attract players - there's a softening of skill gaps.
- mod 5y ago
  In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree. Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it. Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year itching to play. I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be developed. More computational power could change that in the future, I guess.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants people actually play get tackled by machines. Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it. The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette. In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's important to note that while the strategy is unbeatable it is not the best way to extract money from weaker players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5/$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on trying to break even with a machine. Heads Up No Limit which was still being played a fair amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike Cepheus, Pluribus doesn't have an incredibly boring yet precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.
andrepd 5y ago
The Royal Game of Ur is another very very very old game.
- guard-of-terra 5y ago
  ...especially when played with ruleset where different tiles have specific rules.
shusaku 5y ago
It seems like an AI can now be trained just by encoding the rules and having it play itself (no database required to bootstrap). This should be great for variants (assuming enough processing power) since you will always be able to find a partner.
- toxik 5y ago
  I think paying an AI won’t be very satisfying, though. You can’t do sneaky things to a player that is essentially statistics on steroids - even if you pull it off, it’s likely not that you were sneaky that gave you the win, you just found a pattern it didn’t know. It’s dead, cold, calculating. Beating a human will always be more interesting, because you can talk about it, “ha, you could’ve mated me then in two moves,” etc. Humans will never be replaced by anything less than humans.
  - chadcmulligan 5y ago
    Yes, until artificial gloating I suppose - the next big thing :-)
primus202 5y ago
I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules. I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no! So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.
- lllllll0 5y ago
  > I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin Chess originated in India, not the Middle East.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Seems like the precursors might have originated from India but what would evolve into what we today call "Chess" seems to have been taking shape in Persia (Iran).
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      Do the historians who track these things have some metric that they determine that separates 'precursors' from the game itself or is it a human "you know it when you see it" or consensus? Just curious. I imagine it's something similar to how we answer the question "Are these distinct species?" (which doesn't really have a great answer).
- satchlj 5y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out. In "Do Dice Play God", another great book, I learned that the earliest dice (probably used initially for diving the future and only later for gambling) had rectangular sides instead of square ones. I wonder if (a) that was because their creators didn't understand even the very basics of probability, or (b) if the idea of fairness and each number being rolled with equal frequency just wasn't important to them. Not sure.
Revery42 5y ago
I'm actually working on a rogue-like chess game as an independent project right now! It got me thinking and researching more deeply about variant chess. My favorite so far is Fog of War.
- mcguire 5y ago
  Have you looked at InfoChess? (https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-permutations-of-classic-games/ https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-permu...)
  - Revery42 5y ago
    I hadn't seen this before, thanks for the tip! Not being able to capture certain pieces sounds like a fun challenge.
joemi 5y ago
I highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy enough. Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have different colored pieces, but directional pieces to show which side they belong to. Xiangqi is my favorite of the two. To me, it feels like a better depiction of war than Chess. The equivalent of Chess's king stays in a small area, there's a river separating the two sides of the board which some pieces can't cross, there's a catapult for interesting ranged attacks. Maybe I've just grown a bit bored of Chess over all the years and Xiangqi is just relatively newer to me, but Xiangqi feels a lot more fun to play, IMO.
- colordrops 5y ago
  It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could be what makes it fun.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi has 20 on a side.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      Well would you look at that, you are right. The different layout fooled me, with the pawn row being smaller. It even has the same number of different types.
      - joemi 5y ago
        Actually, Xiangqi has 7 types and western Chess only has 6, unless I'm counting wrong.
- 5y ago
jcmeyrignac 5y ago
Some researchers try to rebuild the original rules from these old games, using AI: https://ludii.games https://ludii.games About Senet, a few rules have been suggested: https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet
failrate 5y ago
I enjoy thr Royal Game of Ur and even made my own board. One recommendation I'm trying to propagate is to use 4 "2-sided" randomizers instead of a 4-sided randomized for purposes of more strategic play (normal distribution versus flat). I usually play with a reroll 0s option or my ultimate house rule: 0s get you maximum 1 free reroll token.
sellyme 5y ago
> The game has since been stable for about 500. There were a few patches to chess in the mid to late 20th century that disallowed promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (this was useful for forcing a smothered mate), and to prevent vertically castling to a pawn that had been promoted into a rook on the 8th rank (notated as 0-0-0-0-0-0). Not exactly fundamental changes, but still amusing that they needed to be made after so many centuries.

by zests 5y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

> The computer era is revolutionizing the game again and maybe will usher in new popular variants… It’s going to be fascinating to see. I can imagine games getting “frozen” with hard coded rules and clear Official Rules too. I expect that to happen to word spellings, for example, with most everything we write having a layer of autocorrect in the loop. Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Digital games could do the same, when you can’t make house rules without programming your own variant. Or go the other way, as low-/no-code customization tools and online distribution make it easier to make and share variants than it is to do so at any scale with physical games, subject to the openness (both in design and social factors like IP status) of the base game.

zentiggr 5y ago

I love the idea of "Bad Chess"... such a wild concept on top of an otherwise very structured ruleset.

goblinux 5y ago
Very Bad Chess by Zach Gage is the best I’ve seen of this. It’s on the iOS App Store, might be on google play. Worth a look if you like “bad chess”

btilly 5y ago

It's amazing to think about chess and how rules have been changed slightly over time for 1000 years. Medieval chess was a very different game. For the most stark example, the queen did not get her modern move until around 1450. The game has since been stable for about 500. And yet something as basic as, "white moves first" was first suggested in 1857.

lupire 5y ago
"white moves first" is an arbitrary/aesthetic/logistic choice, that doesn't affect gameplay logic. Left-handed players may prefer Black goes first.
QuercusMax 5y ago
Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though? It's just a convention.
- rodrigosetti 5y ago
  Yes, if our definition of "game" is broadened to mean "culture" around this tradition (as historians might), rather than just reducing to the rules. In this sense, it also includes the conventions, skill-level titles, playing etiquette, etc.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Does "white moves first" actually affect the game, though? Materially, no, though it probably makes it less complex for humans by slightly simplifying the pattern recognition issues, particularly in the opening.
- dvirsky 5y ago
  Statistically, white wins more than black.
  - Jtsummers 5y ago
    Because white goes first. The phrasing and context becomes important. There are two statements that are true but without them as context you end up with a misleading notion: First player wins more than second in chess (because there's a slight advantage). White goes first in chess. Therefore, white wins more than black in chess. However, that conclusion (what you present) is valueless without the context. If you reversed which color starts the game then we'd end up with "black wins more than white in Chess" as a conclusion and your statement would be false. And if there was no specific color which always started, we'd be left with just the first statement: First player wins more than second in chess.

legitster 5y ago

Richard Garfield (mathematician and designer of Magic the Gathering and others) used to give a talk about randomness in games. He talked about the history of chess, and how there used to be a lot more variants of the game (some even being a 4 player game with dice!), and over time competitive players naturally will want to remove random elements from the game. But on the other hand, some amount of wild unpredictability is important to attract players - there's a softening of skill gaps.

mod 5y ago
In some of my own pursuits, I've seen things that make me agree. Pool has little randomness, and therefore it is very difficult to beat a player who is better than you. The best players want to eliminate the possibility of that happening by making longer races, racking their own balls, winner breaks, things like that. Pool is dying for it. Meanwhile poker has a large amount of short term variance (luck) and it keeps bad players interested for years and years. The worst player in the world can sit and beat the best players in the world at any given moment. Poker is still going as strong as ever-- maybe more strongly than ever at this point. People are coming out of the woodwork this year itching to play. I think most of the greatest, longest- lived games in the modern era will need a high amount of randomness, because of computers doing analysis. Even more, with the absent of solvers and the like, many poker variants cannot be solved in real time and all-encompassing strategies cannot be developed. More computational power could change that in the future, I guess.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  The machine doesn't care about randomness. Poker variants people actually play get tackled by machines. Cepheus http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about http://poker.srv.ualberta.ca/about is an approximately perfectly strategy for Heads Up Limit Hold Em. That is, the two player game of Texas Hold Em poker with fixed bet sizes. There are almost certainly other approximately perfect strategies, which would break even against Cepheus over the long term, but you can't beat it. The best an opponent could hope for is to merely get lucky briefly, for which you might just as well play Roulette. In principle if you could memorise Cepheus you could play the same strategy, but it's basically a vast number of fractions/ percentages so you're not going to -- and it's important to note that while the strategy is unbeatable it is not the best way to extract money from weaker players. If you want to grind money playing poker you need to focus on taking $1000 from that holidaymaker playing $5/$10 before anybody else realises they're soft, not on trying to break even with a machine. Heads Up No Limit which was still being played a fair amount not so many years back, is crushed by AI. Pluribus beat the best players in the world, comprehensively. Unlike Cepheus, Pluribus doesn't have an incredibly boring yet precise strategy mapped out that you could copy, it's a result of AI learning. Its bet sizing feels a bit weird to humans, but it ends up taking their money, so, whatever.

andrepd 5y ago

The Royal Game of Ur is another very very very old game.

guard-of-terra 5y ago
...especially when played with ruleset where different tiles have specific rules.

shusaku 5y ago

It seems like an AI can now be trained just by encoding the rules and having it play itself (no database required to bootstrap). This should be great for variants (assuming enough processing power) since you will always be able to find a partner.

toxik 5y ago
I think paying an AI won’t be very satisfying, though. You can’t do sneaky things to a player that is essentially statistics on steroids - even if you pull it off, it’s likely not that you were sneaky that gave you the win, you just found a pattern it didn’t know. It’s dead, cold, calculating. Beating a human will always be more interesting, because you can talk about it, “ha, you could’ve mated me then in two moves,” etc. Humans will never be replaced by anything less than humans.
- chadcmulligan 5y ago
  Yes, until artificial gloating I suppose - the next big thing :-)

primus202 5y ago

I read "It's All a Game" by Tristan Donovan and the chapter on chess was definitely one of the most fascinating. There are so many little bits of human history frozen in amber by the rules. I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. The rooks used to be war elephants hence how they "charge" across the board in straight lines (they were adapted into rooks as the game was Europeanized). Also the reason you never capture the king, which used to be the shah, and resign instead is because killing a rival shah was a big no-no! So many interesting tidbits in that book. Highly recommend.

lllllll0 5y ago
> I had no idea the game had middle eastern origins for instance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chess#Origin Chess originated in India, not the Middle East.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Seems like the precursors might have originated from India but what would evolve into what we today call "Chess" seems to have been taking shape in Persia (Iran).
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Do the historians who track these things have some metric that they determine that separates 'precursors' from the game itself or is it a human "you know it when you see it" or consensus? Just curious. I imagine it's something similar to how we answer the question "Are these distinct species?" (which doesn't really have a great answer).
satchlj 5y ago
Thanks for the recommendation - I will check it out. In "Do Dice Play God", another great book, I learned that the earliest dice (probably used initially for diving the future and only later for gambling) had rectangular sides instead of square ones. I wonder if (a) that was because their creators didn't understand even the very basics of probability, or (b) if the idea of fairness and each number being rolled with equal frequency just wasn't important to them. Not sure.

Revery42 5y ago

I'm actually working on a rogue-like chess game as an independent project right now! It got me thinking and researching more deeply about variant chess. My favorite so far is Fog of War.

mcguire 5y ago
Have you looked at InfoChess? (https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-permutations-of-classic-games/ https://paxsims.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/infochess-and-permu...)
- Revery42 5y ago
  I hadn't seen this before, thanks for the tip! Not being able to capture certain pieces sounds like a fun challenge.

joemi 5y ago

I highly recommend Xiangqi and Shogi. They both feel very chess-like but also very different. They're a little tricky to learn to play if you're not familiar with Chinese characters (Xiangqi) or Japanese characters (Shogi), but once you get familiar with the characters used in the games, it's easy enough. Shogi is really neat in that captured pieces can be returned to the board by the capturer. You don't have different colored pieces, but directional pieces to show which side they belong to. Xiangqi is my favorite of the two. To me, it feels like a better depiction of war than Chess. The equivalent of Chess's king stays in a small area, there's a river separating the two sides of the board which some pieces can't cross, there's a catapult for interesting ranged attacks. Maybe I've just grown a bit bored of Chess over all the years and Xiangqi is just relatively newer to me, but Xiangqi feels a lot more fun to play, IMO.

colordrops 5y ago
It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess, which makes it a more "casual" game than western chess, which could be what makes it fun.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > It has less pieces and is a faster game than chess Xianqi has sixteen pieces on a side just like chess; Shogi has 20 on a side.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Well would you look at that, you are right. The different layout fooled me, with the pawn row being smaller. It even has the same number of different types.
    - joemi 5y ago
      Actually, Xiangqi has 7 types and western Chess only has 6, unless I'm counting wrong.
5y ago

jcmeyrignac 5y ago

Some researchers try to rebuild the original rules from these old games, using AI: https://ludii.games https://ludii.games About Senet, a few rules have been suggested: https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet https://ludii.games/details.php?keyword=Senet

failrate 5y ago

I enjoy thr Royal Game of Ur and even made my own board. One recommendation I'm trying to propagate is to use 4 "2-sided" randomizers instead of a 4-sided randomized for purposes of more strategic play (normal distribution versus flat). I usually play with a reroll 0s option or my ultimate house rule: 0s get you maximum 1 free reroll token.

sellyme 5y ago

> The game has since been stable for about 500. There were a few patches to chess in the mid to late 20th century that disallowed promoting a pawn to an enemy piece (this was useful for forcing a smothered mate), and to prevent vertically castling to a pawn that had been promoted into a rook on the 8th rank (notated as 0-0-0-0-0-0). Not exactly fundamental changes, but still amusing that they needed to be made after so many centuries.