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Dai Seireigi. Variant of Dai Shogi playable with drops. (15x15, Cells: 225) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

💡📝A. M. DeWitt wrote on Mon, Dec 4, 2023 09:35 PM UTC in reply to Bob Greenwade from 04:17 PM:

I do have one complaint about this game family: some pieces bear the names, but not the moves, of existing traditional Shogi pieces.

This is hardly a new precedent. Taikyoku Shogi does this with a ton of pieces that appear in smaller games. I simply used this same precedent when choosing the pieces for the Seireigi family, particularly when programming their Ludii files.

I think, at the least, the ones with altered moves should have new adjectives. (I'm fully willing to build new icons for them as needed.)

I must be very careful about this. Changing the name or move of a piece, especially while a game on GC is underway, can have a variety of unwanted effects (similar to when fixing that bug in Dai Seireigi broke our game forcing me to restart it). At some point it is better to maintain consistency than it is to change things to match the traditional Shogi roster.

Another variable to keep in mind is that the Seireigi family incorporates the drop rule. This rule demands that most pieces have a forward bias to their movements and that most pieces be relatively weak. This means I have to carefully consider what moves to give each piece so as not to destroy the delicate balance of power in each game.

That being said, renaming is not completely out of the realm of possibility for some pieces.