Xodul - a chess variant

Hi!

I want to present for you the xodul game, which is a chess variant. This game is inspired on international chess, chinese chess (xiang-qi), and japanese chess (shogi).

In particular, xodul has 10 different pieces from each other: car, knight, bishop, queen, king, wizard, guard, lance, cannon and pawns. In this game, the promotion of pawns is made through a different rule: a pawn can be replaced by a piece captured by one of the players; therefore, the owner of each piece can change.

setup

-- the initial setup of this game is:

©Sílvia M.G. Rodrigues

where the bottom pieces from left to right are: the car, the knight, the bishop, the queen, the king, the wizard, the guard, the lance, and the cannon. The game is played on a board with 8x9 lines & columns.

promotion of pawns

• at any phase of the game, instead of doing a normal move, the player can promote any of its pawns by replacing it with a captured piece (along the game, that can be done the number of times the player wants, while having pawns);

• if a pawn reaches the last line it is converted into a “general”, which can move one square to the front or one square in any diagonal.

rules

>> the rules of xodul follow the rules of international chess, except in the movement of the additional pieces, the promotion of pawns, and that in xodul there is neither castle nor en passant.

objective:

– to checkmate the opponent’s king.

movements of the pieces

	the car moves along lines or columns, the desired number of squares.
	the knight moves in the form of the capital letter “L”, jumping over the pieces with its movement, if the player wants that.
	the bishop moves along diagonal directions, the desired number of squares.
	the queen moves along lines, columns or diagonals, any number of squares.
	the king moves one square in any direction.
	the wizard has two options: i) the special movement – if the king is not in check the wizard can use the teleport, i.e. it can move directly to any empty square of the board; ii) in addition, the wizard has a base action of moving exactly two squares in diagonal without jumping over pieces (that can be used for instance to capture a piece or to defend checks).
	the guard has two options: i) it can move one square up /down /left /right; ii) in addition, it can move various squares along its line /column in the direction of its king up to the maximum of intercepting a coordinate of that king.
	the lance has two types of movement: i) it can move to the front any number of squares (without making jumps over other pieces); ii) in addition, it can move one square in any diagonal.
	the cannon has a normal movement equal to the car's movement; however, when it is going to make a capture it must jump over one, and only one, other piece of any colour.
	the pawn's normal movement is to move one square to the front if that square is empty; in its first move, it has the option of moving two squares to the front; in another hand, its capture movement is to move one square in diagonal to the front.

inspirations

in xodul…

• there are some pieces equal in name and movement to the international chess [the knight, the bishop, the queen and the king];

• there are two pieces equal in name and movement to those of chinese chess /xiang-qi [the car and the cannon; note that the movement of the car is equal to the movement of the rook piece of international chess];

• there are two pieces with repeated names of chinese /xiang-qi chess and japanese chess /shogi, but with original movements [the guard and the lance, respectively];

• there is a totally original piece [the wizard];

• and finally, there are the pawns, whose normal movement is the same as they have in international chess, but whose promotion in this game is made accordingly to original rules.

--> inventor of this chess variant: Sílvia M.G. Rodrigues.

I hope you will like xodul! I can add more stuff about this game if you want... [info about xodul, pictures, 2D and 3D xodul sets, etc.]

In the description of the Guard, when it moves more squares towards the line or rank of the King, you did not mention if it can or cannot jump.

"at any phase of the game, instead of doing a normal move, the player can promote any of its pawns by replacing it with a captured piece"

---> if white captures a black Queen but still has his own Queen - how does this work? You would need an extra white Queen to perform this. In fact you would need an entire duplicate set of all pieces.

Thanks for the comments, evert. I will clarify the two aspects:

The guard cannot jump over other pieces. I didn't mention that because I assumed it as the default.

Regarding the idea of the changing of the colours of pieces, this was really a challenging aspect, for which I had to create a new model: Each piece has a neutral colour, and to each piece has attached a rubber that can be white or black meaning who is the owner of that piece. Therefore when you capture a black queen and your colour is white, you replace a white pawn by a queen that will turn into white. Here follows a picture of a xodul set with this model:

Nice mixture of Shogi, Xiangqi and Chess. Fun to play maybe one or two games. The Guard's move is interesting.