From: Luke Merritt HOTMAIL COM> Date: 30 jan 1999 Subject: Taikyoku shogi laboring I've spent the past few days pouring over the taikyoku info Patrick has provided (many thanks!). I've more or less gotten sufficient English equivalents for most of the pieces. The only problem is with the kyuuhan and, well, the other kyuuhan. Since they're on the same rank, I guess we could use "left heavenly dove" and "right heavenly dove" for now, as the "han" character is only slightly different between them and means roughly the same thing. I've also gone over a piece-by-piece comparison for all the pieces which seem to have had their moves changed. Many of the moves, in my opinion, appear to be the originally intended moves (for all of the variants they appear in, not just taikyoku), while others were obviously transcribed in error. For example, the kylin is listed as not being able to jump along a file, the tengu can't step move orthagonally, the fire demon is actually transcribed as having the move of a water buffalo, which really doesn't make sense if the water buffalo still promotes TO a fire demon. I must also state that while I believe the moves listed in the taikyoku rules for the vermillion sparrow, white tiger, blue dragon, and turtle snake are correct, for the sake of symmetry I feel that the turtle snake should be paired with the vermillion sparrow and the blue dragon with the white tiger, as opposed to what is listed in the initial setup (this goes for tai shogi, as well). Also, I propose that the arrow with three slashes may represent being able to jump to the third square and continue to range move in that direction. That is the only logical move I could think of for such notation. The only thing that's left is most stuff related to promotion (what promotes to what, and the rest of the moves for the promoted pieces). I think I may quickly set up a no-frills website that contains my opinions and findings on all this. Some of you may think that this is all a waste of time because the game is so huge...maybe it is, but then again, I find all of the shogi variants much more interesting than western chess, regardless of whether or not a game can be played in one sitting. --Luke ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com