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Can Chess, with Hexagons? [video]
- jedc 3y agoGreat Wikipedia reference about this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess
- nubinetwork 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36679545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36679545
- _nalply 3y agoNow let's design chess variants on a hyperbolical plane!
- hinkley 3y agoRed Queen problem?
- jerf 3y agoWhenever you think to yourself that Chess, but X, would be interesting, you should just pop it into a search engine: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40511/hyperbolic-chess https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40511/hyperbolic-chess I say this not as a "you should have searched", but because it's fun. There are thousands of chess variants in the world ( https://www.chessvariants.com/Gindex.html https://www.chessvariants.com/Gindex.html ) and it's amazing where this simple game can be taken.
- _nalply 3y agoMy, how search got bad nowadays! I did a cursory search but got nothing interesting. Thanks for link! However that chess board is only hyperbolical in the center. A real hyperbolical chess would have five neighbors in each cell. That's a real mind-bender.
- apendleton 3y agoI've also seen several different variants for chess on a torus (imagined -- still played on a flat board, but you play as if each edge is connected to the opposite one). Pieces end up having basically the same allowed moves (IIRC the only required change is that a piece making a move where it loops around the board and back to its original position is disallowed), but a different initial setup is required, because given the regular one, both sides start the game already check-mated. For further brain-bending, you can do a Klein bottle instead of a torus.
- rini17 3y agoOr aperiodic tiles. There you can have every game with different "map".
- wakamoleguy 3y agoIn the final state where white resigns, it looks like the king could simply capture the queen instead. Wasn't it unprotected?
- amflare 3y agoYes, he mentioned in a comment[0] that he got his hex diagonals confused. > My brain was clearly too melted by that point -- I got my hex diagonals confused. CURSE YOU DIAGONALS! [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgR3yESAEVE&lc=Ugz_oSLguMoeaVkugGN4AaABAg.9s-LI3bFJ389s-M7pcbfF2
- hammock 3y agoOne of the earliest computer games I played was 3-level chess (https://images.chesscomfiles.com/uploads/v1/article/288.2f44f9ca.668x375o.45453a559626@2x.jpg https://images.chesscomfiles.com/uploads/v1/article/288.2f44...) on like a Tandy PC computer (DOS)
- kevinpet 3y agoIt doesn't make sense to me why pawns attack on a file (adjoining hexagons) rather than diagonal (hexagon pointed to but separated by the side between two others).
- mkehrt 3y agoA youtube comment points out that this allows pawn walls which protect each other and block on file moves, just like in real chess.
- user070223 3y agoInterested in an engine piece valuation and "novelties" (like capture towards the edge, or perhaps overpowered openings)
- Mountain_Skies 3y agoIn the almost Chess domain, I loved the 3M/Avalon Hill game 'Feudal', which was Chess-like but with more types of pieces, more complex movements, and terrain types. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal_(game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudal_(game)
- 1lint 3y agoThis brings back memories of first playing civ5, which used a hexagonal grid
- qsort 3y agoThe problem with those variants is that they force the usual chess pieces in contexts where they don't really belong. Rooks and bishops follow the obvious geometry of the square chessboard. Knights are the natural complement of rooks and bishops: they move to any of the closest squares neither a rook nor a bishop could reach. Pawns defend each other and form the game's "structure". Queens are rather arbitrary (you could have rook+knight or bishop+knight instead of rook+bishop), but a strong piece is needed to allow for dynamic play. On an hexagon they don't really make sense. Is there a more "natural" set of pieces that's built on the geometry of an hexagon rather than being an awkward translation of the usual chess pieces?
- hyperhopper 3y agoNot specifically "hexagonal chess, but a very tactically similar hexagonal abstract strategy game called "Hive"[1] is very well regarded in the board game community and relevant to this discussion for anybody even tangentially interested. Personally, I think it's more worth spending your time looking into that than yet another variant of chess. Also if you get a hankering to play it, it is available on boardgamearena online. [1] https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2655/hive
- Lyngbakr 3y agoHive is fantastic fun. I found it easy to learn, but that there was some strategic depth that really gave it replay value. An interesting aspect is that there isn't a board as such, rather the pieces together constitute the playing area which morphs as the game unfolds. It's a great on-the-go game since the pieces are tough and it's a convenient size to be chucked in a bag for the beach, train journeys, etc.
- jjnoakes 3y agoThe moves described in the video seemed like they were decent analogues to me. The bishop moved along the same color and could attack rooks and knights from safety and could slide between pieces. Rooks could attack bishops and knights safely. Knights could attack rooks and bishops and queens safely. What specifically did you think was way out of context?
- mikewarot 3y agoWhy aren't there 3 players? It could be scaled that way.
- wirrbel 3y agoThere is a hexagonal shogi variant with 3 players The problem is that 2 players kind of would team up to get the third player out of the game which is imbalanced. Than you have a 2 player game ..
- mr_toad 3y agoBut there is the possibility of betrayal and switching sides. In a winner takes all game as soon as one player looks like they’re winning the weaker players have an incentive to gang up on them.
- rtpg 3y agoAn even more subtle problem is that attacking feels like a bad idea because if A and B go at each other, they both lose pieces while C is unaffected. Maybe you can imagine some circular pinning that involves 3 players but...well.
- jmiskovic 3y agoThe Duke is another chess variant I'm fascinated by. It's still on rectangular grid, with more varied rules for each piece movement and attack patterns. What I find interesting is that these rules are inscribed on game pieces themselves. Some pieces even change their patterns after their action, by flipping over their tile and exposing the alternate pattern. I find this concept of game rules moving around the board alluring for some reason. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36235/duke https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36235/duke
- Aerroon 3y agoI really don't like the diagonal moves.
- wirrbel 3y agoThere are multiple hexagonal Chess variants, there is a Wikipedia article on that: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess I am implementing a chess engine for Polgar star chess for fun currently
- TheDudeMan 3y agoYesterday it was lasers, today hexagons. Tomorrow, hexagonal laser chess.
- IIAOPSW 3y agoI do not know with what pieces Chess 3 will be played, but Chess 4 will be played with sticks and stones.
- globular-toast 3y agoIs the title a joke that I don't understand?
- TheRealPomax 3y agoNo. It's literally what if chess, but hexagons.
- macintux 3y agoThe creator likes to have fun with language.
- jayknight 3y agoAnd hexagons, the bestagons.
- globular-toast 3y agoMe too, but I can't see what the joke is here. Is it a meme? It just looks like malformed English. Is that fun?
- TheRealPomax 3y agoIt's just a standard omitted words joke. "What if [we tried to play] chess, but [using] hexagons [instead of squares]". After all, what if hexagon chess rules, but video.
- globular-toast 3y agoI get your examples but, for some reason, the video title completely misses the mark for me. Odd.
- nickpeterson 3y agoI’m compelled to mention the board game hex. It’s excellent, print a paper board and get some colored pencils/marks and play a few rounds with a friend. It’s great.
- abnry 3y agoGoogle Hexagon Chess.
- aquova 3y agoOne thing that bothers me about these rules is that the Pawn's definition of diagonal doesn't match that of the Bishop/Queen/King's. The pawn is able to capture "to either side", but the other pieces consider diagonal to be the hexes of the same color (a more convincing argument IMO). Perhaps that extra movement gave too much of a boost to pawn advances?
- wirrbel 3y agoPolgars star chess has solved this by using adjacent fields as diagonal fields. The orientation of the board is as such, that there are 3 axes, North-South (Vertical), Northwest-Southeast and Southwest-Northeast (the diagonals). Using this approach, bishop and pawn move alongside the same diagonals, one loses however the "color" aspect of the bishop (i.e. the bishop can reach every field). Polgar's rook can then only move vertically, not to the side. The queen moves in all 6 directions of the hexagon. This leads to an interesting game dynamics where the bishop actually feels more like a rook, and the rook resembles the Lance in shogi.
- ansible 3y agoYou can play hexagonal chess and a bunch of other variants at greenchess.net.
- nextaccountic 3y agoI want to share https://www.pychess.org/ https://www.pychess.org/ as well - while it doesn't have hexagonal chess, it has tons of variants and you can play both against the computer (that runs fairy stockfish - an engine that works with many chess variants) and against human players My current favorite is https://www.pychess.org/variants/empire https://www.pychess.org/variants/empire - it's been designed to be wildly asymmetric but actually the balance between the two armies are more even than regular chess' white vs black pieces. My problem is that there is no literature, no published theory on most chess variants. At least I can't find any theory on empire ehess, and thus I have to develop strategies on my own - but that's how I played chess 20 years ago and it was awful. The best part of chess IMO is the social aspect of having an evolving theory (or as other games call it, an evolving metagame), and the way we can learn theory to be able to quickly assess who is winning at a given position (a highly nontrivial task), or assess whether a move is "natural" or not.
- adamredwoods 3y ago1-D chess: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/322734/one-dimensional-chess https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/322734/one-dimensional-c...