C.S. Graves
Rondel dagger on a Glinski hexagonal chess board.
#chess #hexagonalchess #dagger #rondeldagger
JdeBPOf course, that leaves only pawns, rooks, and the king. (A queen with no diagonals is effectively a rook, after all.)
So perhaps the most no-half-measures flavour of #HexagonalChess that leaves squares behind has 1 king, 3 rooks, and either 5 or 12 pawns.
I'm not sure that having only 3 kinds of piece makes it simple, given that pawns cannot capture along the forward axis, given that only rooks can reach the tactically important board edges, and especially in the two ranks of pawns flavour.
As I mentioned, people apparently saw how different Gliński #HexagonalChess was to square #chess in the 1970s and quickly invented variants that made things more like the opening game of square chess again.
But if one wanted square chess back, why not simply play square chess? A truly "bestagon" world does away with the diagonal pieces and captures entirely, and every diagonal move becomes 2 or more axial moves.
No bishops, no knights, and no queens.
Of course Gliński #chess has the mirror image fool's mate available for Black; so if White doesn't go for the bishop-led nuclear option, Black can.
The thing that makes bishops such vital parts of the opening game in #HexagonalChess, and forgetting about them being square-chess thinking, is that Black's mirror fool's mate cannot be countered by White's king's knight, but instead White has either to get xyr king's knight's pawn forward or to counter with xyr own diagonal pieces.
Since Gliński #chess starts in the middle game with diagonals open, the worst response in #HexagonalChess to a bishop opening is pawns. That's square chess thinking.
Black's far better(!) options are to (a) open up another place for xyr king to escape to by moving the front bishop out of the way (e.g. respond with the very same fool's mate), (b) get xyr queen's knight across the board early so that it can sacrifice for White's bishop, or (c) do the same sacrifice but with the queen.
The Pritchard-Beasley Classified
Encyclopedia of Chess Variants gives a fool's mate in 4 for #HexagonalChess:
1 Qc8 Qc14
2 b7 b15
3 Bb5 e12
4 Qxf17.
They have too much focus on how square chess uses the queen for fool's mate. In hexagonal #chess, opening with the bishops is the nuclear option, especially if Black is thinking in terms of square chess openings with pawns:
1 Bd9 b13
2 Bh5 h11
3 Bj11 mate
Gliński chess starts in the middle game with diagonals open.
I encountered #CGPGrey's video on hexagonal chess recently, and it and the few other videos on the subject gave me some pause for thought.
Looking at how little traction the subject has had on Hacker News over the years, I wonder whether #chess is just something that computer people treat as a solved problem, and are no longer interested in. "The computers out-chess humans, let's replace the artists and support centre workers next!"