Comments by Georgi Markov
The rules above seem to be seriously flawed due to a series of errors in the literature. Please check our paper with Stefan Härtel in Board Game Studies Journal 14, pp. 43-60: https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/bgs-2020-0003
In fact, the rook - both here and in the Emperor's game - does end up next to the king. After Tressau's (and I believe this is the correct name, not Tressan: see Oettinger’s Bibliotheca Shahiludii) rules for the Sultan's game, K moves four squares towards R which lands on the adjacent square. Check the illustrative games in Tressau's book. I have a paper in press in the Board Game Studies Journal dealing with the Emperor's game and the Sultan's game which I hope will be published in 2022; will provide a link when it is.
K to b/j, R to c/i.
Tressau does not explicitly mention how many spaces the rook goes, but the landing square for R in the Sultan's game is obvious enough from the provided illustrative games: see mating position in game 1 (p. 87) and move 28 in game 4 (p. 89). [On move 20, White castles "to the right"; move 28 is Ri1-f1, or 119 to 116 in the original notation; that's the first R move after castling].
Tressau modified the rules for the Kaiserspiel (e.g. castling rule is different in the Archiv der Spiele description) and practically developed the rules for the Sultanspiel himself based on Peguilhen's initial - but never fully developed - idea. Later sources are ultimately based on Tressau, with errors. Thus it's Tressau's rules that should be taken as definitive, the illustrative games were played by Tressau himself and after his own rules, so there is hardly any chance for a misunderstanding. There's a discussion of all that in my paper in press, I'll provide a link when it's published.
Thank you very much indeed!
Meanwhile, I realized I seem to have somehow misread your "search for the Archiv der Spiele" as "search within"; I hope this link works: https://books.google.bg/books?id=If5dAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Thank you for your comment and the discussion.
Indeed. Please see my comments on the Sultan's game page from October 20 and 21.
My comment here on Oct 20th was in reply to your previous one in fact. But I still haven't learned how to incorporate a previous message or parts of it.
Hi Georgi,
The easiest way, (and the way I use), is to switch the format from Markdown to WYSIWYG. Then click the quotation marks from the toolbar to enter blockquote mode. Then copy the text you want to quote from the section above the edit form and paste it in. Hitting the enter key twice will exit blockquote mode so you can start typing your response.
Thanks a lot Greg!
I'll provide a link when it's published.
And here it is:
https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/bgs-2022-0017
Please check my paper dealing with the Emperor's Game (and Sultan's): https://sciendo.com/article/10.2478/bgs-2022-0017
"A World of Chess" by Jean-Louis Cazaux and Rick Knowlton has this game as Hyderabad decimal chess, with rules which I find a significant improvement to Gollon's. I've made some further suggestions here: https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/bgs-2022-0017
Thank you very much for your comments!
You certainly have a point. It never occurred to me that Oettinger might have been just guessing, I assumed he knew the author's name from elsewhere and opted for "Tressau" even though the last letter looks a lot like "n" indeed. Plus the only Tressans I could find while surfing the web were French.
On an unrelated subject, I shamelessly appropriated your Archchancellor and Crown Princess for a reformed variant of the Duke of Rutland's chess based on Charles Gilman's Modern Manners, here: https://hal-univ-paris13.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03737330/document
(And of course the short superqueen suggested by Stefan Härtel and me for a reformed version of Turkish great chess is your Archchancellor again but I don't think I was aware of it when writing that paper). I think those two pieces (RNK and BNK) work really well on large boards.
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Please check my 2015 paper on this game in Board Game Studies Journal 9, pp. 41-49: http://bgsj.ludus-opuscula.org/PDF_Files/41_49_Markov_web.pdf
As for "Tchigorin, Capablanca and Lenin": photos of Ulyanov's chess table on the internet show a board with 160 squares, i.e. the western variant with 3 additional rows, and no fortresses. Information on Capablanca, I suspect, is due to mixing up double chess (which Capablanca did play indeed), and four-handed chess. No idea about Tchigorin but I doubt it.