Statistics comparison Chess and Arimaa

Thanks if i went their i would have lost it.

It's probably a fine game and I should apologize to Xilmi for making a snotty post but sometimes I just can't help myself...

@baddogno: May I ask what exactly about this specific quoted post it is that killed your interest?

Maybe I should try wording a more appealing advertisment:

Arimaa is an abstract strategy game designed to be playable with a standard-chess-set.
While all pieces move in the same easy similar fashion, the part where it becomes interesting is how they interact with each other.
Instead of the usual "I step on your square to kill you"-mechanic as used in chess and most of it's variants, there is a compeltely new machanic where stronger pieces can bully weaker ones by freezing, pushing or pulling them around and into deadly traps placed on c3, c6, f3 and f6.
These powers can, however, be neglected by teamwork of several weaker pieces that can unfreeze eachother and prevent traps from working by standing next to them.
This makes capturing pieces quite difficult and require some preparations as taking over control of a trap-square and blocking access for the opponents pieces trying to come to the rescue.

But since capturing isn't even required for fulfilling the victory-condition, that ain't much of a problem here.

The victory-condition is as simple as moving a single one of your weakest pieces to the opposite site of the board, much like promoting a pawn.
Not easy when there's a lot of dangers lurking out on the way.

Also, again unlike in chess the game does not become less complicated the more pieces are captured, it becomes more and more crazy since less pieces means there's an increasing number of oportunities to threaten a sneakthrough.

The last game-defining feature is that "a move" drastically differs from what a move is in other games. Each move consists of up to 4 steps that can freely be distributed between your, and in case of pushing/pulling, you opponents pieces aswell.
This leaves you with an overwhelming amount of roundabout 17,000 unique possibilities each move.

I don't know of anyone who actually tried it out and thought it was a bad game. Because, just in case I haven't made that clear: The unique gameplay-mechanics are actually lots of fun in addition to creating an extremely deep, balanced and strategically challenging game.

I think I only have time for one incredibly deep and complex game in my life right now.

Maybe in the next one i'll play Arimaa.

It does look intriguing.

Yep, like I said, I owe you an apology.  Seems like an interesting variant, although I find standard chess challenging enough.  The post was just so indecipherable to someone not familiar with the game that I got turned off by the implied complexity, and the cute little rabbits can't push rabbits avatar didn't help either.  Anyway, please accept my apologies for a snotty post and good luck with all your games.

That pieces have different names is not really a sign of complexity. Just of unfamiliarity. Once you know that Arimaa is like "Placement Chess", where people start with all pieces in hand, and then must put them in any way they want on the first two ranks of the board, a statement like

"Put Queen on the line of opponents King and place own King as far away as possible from the opponents Queen."

as tactical advice for how to place your pieces holds little mystery.

In at least one of his post the guy who analyzed all the data said, that the relatively higher win-ratio for gold in engine vs. engine games would be caused by the engines not making proper use of the second-setup-advantage of the silver-player.

I think that's what the post was about is: "Sharp", which currently is the best rated engine/bot, when moving second reacts to the first players setup by "Put elephant on the line of opponents camel and place own camel as far away as possible from the opponents elephant."

of course that's not the most sophisticated indepth-tactical-thing.

Yes the original pieces of the game uses "cute rabbits" instead of pawns and that might make it leave the impression, that it is a very simple "chess for kids" or something like that.

And while it is indeed easily teachable to kids, because this was one of the inventors goals, so he could teach his to his then 4-years-old son "Aamir", doesn't mean that it has a low skill-cap.

Even its world-champions think they have only scratched the surface and often feel they lose control about what's going on.

Since each side moves 4 pieces per turn, Arimaa is ideal for a true team-game. There can be a 2-person team as well as a 4-person team.

That's quite an interesting though actually. But I could kinda forsee situations like "What? Why did you do that? Didn't you see what I was trying to accomplish with my step?!" ^^

chess ratings  400-2900

arimaa rating 1000-2600

Important to note that arimaa has no draws, which should give a wider gap to arimaa. currently, chess seems to be more complex, even with this gap advantage, but we will see if arimaa will eventually surpass chess in complexity.

hmm this thread looks kind of old but i'm looking for players to play arimaa with. anyone down or know someone who might be?