Life In 19x19

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arimaa

You can play online, but if you teach one of your friends how to play, you can play this game using a chess set.

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"Arimaa is played on an 8×8 board with four trap squares. There are six kinds of pieces, ranging from elephant (strongest) to rabbit (weakest). Stronger pieces can push or pull weaker pieces, and stronger pieces freeze weaker pieces. Pieces can be captured by dislodging them onto a trap square when they have no orthogonally adjacent friendly pieces. There are three ways to win the game:

Move a rabbit to the eighth row (for the gold player) or first row (for the silver player) of the board.
Capture all enemy rabbits.
Deprive the opponent of legal moves.
The two players, Gold and Silver, each control sixteen pieces. These are, in order from strongest to weakest: one elephant (Elephant), one camel (Camel), two horses (Horse), two dogs (Dog), two cats (Cat), and eight rabbits (Rabbit). These may be represented by the king, queen, rooks, bishops, knights, and pawns respectively when one plays using a chess set."
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There are a few players on here who've tried Arimaa, though I don't know if anyone actively plays. I played for several months and managed to play through the bot ladder on the site (not really a significant achievement, to be honest). Eventually, I found that I got stuck in the same way as I did with Chess--I found too many positions where I didn't have the faintest idea of how to play. In a Go game, I might be behind, I might eventually reach the point where I resign because there's no hope of winning, but I always feel like I know what moves are available and what they achieve.

It seems like a good game, but it just doesn't work for me.

I was interested to see that Arimaa, which was designed by a Chess player to be hard for computers, was actually 'mastered' (as in beat best humans, though as it's such a young game humans are probably relatively weak) by computers last year, before Go was!

hyperpape wrote:In a Go game, I might be behind, I might eventually reach the point where I resign because there's no hope of winning, but I always feel like I know what moves are available and what they achieve.

Good for you.

When I was a shodan, I came up with an only slightly tongue in cheek definition for shodan: Being shodan means that at every move you have at least some idea where to play.