Lielow: Playable chess-like game that uses only checkers | Hacker News Reader

Lielow: Playable chess-like game that uses only checkers

ludii.games

49 pointsamichail28 comments

I love chess/checkers variants.

Here's a fun one that was invented(though probably not the first) by someone at my chess club. They called it ludo chess. Normal chess rules, except: two pieces can stack on the same square, and subsequently move together with the combined power of both pieces. You can also just move one of them, splitting the stack.

We've had a lot of fun playing this at our club over a few beers. One of my favourite strategies is sticking your king on a knight so it can jump out of mating nets. And carrying a pawn with your rook to create a dangerous passed pawn within a couple moves.

If you have a pawn stacked on another piece, and you use the other piece's move to get to the back row, does the pawn promote, or do you have to have the pawn step to the back row on its own power? The former seems like a recipe for exceedingly fast promotion in the mid-to-end game.

It's been a while but iirc the latter would be the case. The pawn has to do the move itself.

So you could get a pawn promotion using a queen in three moves (assuming there's an empty space on the rear rank and an open path to reach it!), instead of two. (One to combine the queen and pawn, one to move both pieces to the penultimate rank, and one pawn move to achieve the promotion.)

Indeed. Or a rook, or a bishop.

I have seen a commercially produced variant of this with pieces that can be clasped together.

That was probably Paco Ŝako, aka Peace Chess. Only similar insofar as two pieces can share a space, otherwise quite different - there's no captures, rather pieces embrace, with the goal to embrace the opponent's king.

https://pacosako.com/en

hi failrate, you might have seen paco sako chess, but that seems to be a joining of black and white instead of two black or two white pieces (the latter being a bit similar to the musquito mechanism in hive, a hexagonal chess like game).

https://www.sasktoday.ca/central/opinion/the-meeple-guild-ne...

I believe you are correct. I wonder if you could play both games with the same set.

From a first glance it looks like it. Generally we would just sort of put the pieces next to eachother. A smallish piece set compared to the board size would be helpful, but that's no issue when you're at a chess club.

hi mtlmtlmtlmtl, then you might also like dameo, emergo and other abstract games by designer christian freeling. it's playable on the dagaz web engine and stephen tavener's aiai.

https://www.mindsports.nl/index.php/dagaz/767-dameo

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/24698/dameo/forums/0

He has a fascinating page on the evolution of draughts variants https://www.mindsports.nl/index.php/on-the-evolution-of-drau...

There's also an interesting playable chess variant called king's guard (or the more diverging chad and shakti) if you are bored of the lichess variants (i like crazyhouse or king of the hill).

Christian Freeling is great :) Emergo is one of my favorites. Btw (since you mentioned Ai Ai), Lielow is also playable in Ai Ai. And the AI is much stronger in Ai Ai than in the Ludii player.

Cool! Speaking of "complex games that can be played with only checkers," I want to give a shout-out to Breakthrough: [0]

All your pieces are the same, and move sort of like pawns in chess. (Slightly different.) The first player to move a piece all the way across the board wins.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_(board_game)

The BGG entry for the game - https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/349408/lielow

> Note: In this implementation, jumping off the board is only possible if the stack can reach exactly 1 row or column beyond the perimeter. But it seems to always be the case that it is possible to jump off the board when a stack is big enough. Please let Michael know if you encounter a scenario where a piece is stuck. This should not be allowed according to the rules of the game.

True. Suppose you moved from A to B, and your stack just became 8 tall. Then you must have jumped from one edge of the board to the other; if you jump back the way you came, you'll land on the "margin" outside of the board. Also, there are no other legal moves besides jumping onto the margin; in particular, you can never become 9 tall.

Repeat for smaller heights: If you are height N, but no other moves land on the board, then moving back in the direction the piece last came from will put it on the margin.

I was both wrong and confused when I wrote that. It is not always possible to jump off the board in this implementation when a stack is big enough to reach outside the board. A very simple counterexample is A2-A1. That puts a 2-stack in the corner. Such a stack has the range to jump off, but cannot be removed in the current Ludii implementation. That's a violation of the rules of the game.

But I confused this with a stack being completely stuck, i.e. not having any moves, which is a different question. That's the situation I vaguely saw was impossible.

- https://github.com/Quuxplusone/Lielow. (which includes a chance to play against AI)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YccEDjAe7vE (video by Alek Erickson, presumably the cocreator)

How many pieces do you typically need to play this game? The rules place no explicit limit in the size of the stack, although if a stack gets to be 8 pieces high, then it can't do anything other than leave the board, which puts an obvious theoretical maximum at no more than 64 pieces per side (4 checkers sets). I wouldn't be surprised if the actual theoretical maximum is lower than that.

https://ludii.games/lud/games/Lielow.lud deciphered with https://ludii.games/downloads/LudiiGameLogicGuide.pdf

    (equipment {
        (board (square 10))
        (piece "Disc" Each)
    })

The board is 10x10

    (start {
        (place "Disc1" 
            (difference
                (difference 
                    (expand (sites Bottom) steps:2)
                    (expand (sites Bottom) steps:1)
                )
                (sites Outer)
            )
        )
        (place "Disc2" 
            (difference
                (difference 
                    (expand (sites Top) steps:2)
                    (expand (sites Top) steps:1)
                )
                (sites Outer)
            )
        )
    })

One row of pieces on the top, and one row of pieces on the bottom (?). I wonder if parametric definition (like a list comprehension) would be clearer... Interesting approach nevertheless.

I wrote that .lud-file. There are 3 known issues with it: (1) The identity of a player's king is only updated after their own turn, not after each player's turn. (2) It is not always possible to suicide a stack that has the proper reach, because it might overshoot the mark (my code requires it to land exactly 1 step outside the board). (3) Suicided pieces are not removed if the resulting state has no uniquely talles stack of the current player's color. All of these issues are fixed in a new .lud-file written by someone else. (I usually write my own, but this is the second time the same guy has come to my rescue.)

The 10x10 aspect of it appears to be because there's an invisible outer ring of "if your piece moves here, it is removed from the game" which wouldn't be possible with an 8x8 board that doesn't have an "outside".

If you play the game, you'll see an 8x8 board.

I'd also love to know the upper bound on how long a game can be.

It's not loading for me :-/ the game sounds interesting from the rules listed.

  details.php?keyword=Lielow:1333 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set properties of null (setting 'onclick')
      at addPopups (details.php?keyword=Lielow:1333:28)
      at details.php?keyword=Lielow:1706:9
  addPopups @ details.php?keyword=Lielow:1333
  (anonymous) @ details.php?keyword=Lielow:1706
  mapEventListeners.js:1 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'addEventListener')
      at mapEventListeners.js:1:43

Sounds interesting, although the initial state doesn't seem to be described by the rules. How many stacks do you start with? Can you gain new stacks?

The initial state is 8 checkers in the pawn position of a chess board.

You cannot gain additional stacks.

(Some additional info on the game and its mechanics : https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2720024/lielow-wartime-tale... )

Checkers is a playable chess-like game that uses only checkers.

What does "Passing is not allowed." mean?

You have to take your turn.

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