I recently discovered the Banana Ball exhibition baseball games, and their custom ruleset, featuring limitations, crowd participation mechanics and special roles among other things.

This reminded me of (and it’s an derivative game rather than an alternate ruleset) Three-Sided Football, which, among other things, is a Situationist, philosophical and sociological rabbit-hole.

I also recall dark chess, a chess variant with line-of-sight mechanics, to emulate the fog of war. There are thousands of chess variants stretching back a thousand years, this is just one of the first I learned of which really interested me.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I’ve never actually played a game (but I have a set!), but, shogi, or, Japanese chess.

    • Nine rows, nine ranks. Three nearest you are yours. The middle three are no man’s land.

    • The second rank only contains generals, two of the new pieces. There’s a silver general and a gold general. Nine pawns.

    • Any captured piece can be reclaimed, at the cost of a turn. It goes back to its starting position (which must be open).

    • All pieces are 2D tiles with black kanji designations. The tiles are directional and always point away from you. (They’re slightly pentagonal.)

    • All pieces can promote by reaching the ninth row. You flip the tile over and the designation becomes red and it gains new moves. (Its name changes too.)

    • Most pieces can’t move backwards. This is one of the main abilities of a promoted (red) piece. The tile always points at your opponent.

    • Games are timed like chess in official matches, and I assume they take longer. They’re typically played on the floor, though I think that’s more a Japanese thing than a shogi thing.

    If you’re inclined toward anime at all, March Comes in Like a Lion is a nice little cosy slice of life story about a shogi player (and the insert song Nyan Shogi is a bop you’ll love to hate (it’s cats teaching you how to play Shogi)).