Check out Janggi (Korean Chess), our featured variant for December, 2024.

This page is written by the game's inventor, Ralph Betza.

Cavewars CSIPGS Chess

Cavewars is one of the best csipgs games; its rules are relatively simple, and they worked hard on the AI, and therefore the computer occasionally (in a limited range of circumstances) appears to be playing fairly well...

Cavewars has a 5-level 3D dungeon, and so "cavewars csipgs chess" should also have one the same size. I thought it would be amusing to have hexes on some levels and squares on others!

Thus, levels 1, 3, and 5 would look like this:

         __
      __/b3\__
     /a3\__/c3\
     \__/b2\__/
     /a1\__/c1\
     \__/b1\__/
        \__/

While levels 2 and 4 would look like this:

    +---+---+---+
    |a3 | b3| c3|
    +---+---+---+
    |a2 | b2| c2|
    +---+---+---+
    |a1 | b1| c1|
    +---+---+---+

And we would need to add some rules:

  1. Budget: the automatic budget is zero.
    
    
  2. Food squares: the location b2 on every level is a food square. You get 1 zorkmid per turn for each food square you occupy at the start of your turn.
    
    
  3. Vertical movement: You may only move vertically up or down through a hole. There are no holes at the start of a game.
    
    
  4. Drill: The "drill" power costs 1 zorkmid extra. A piece with this power can drill a hole up or down; the destination square must be empty, must not contain a piece, a food square, an existing square, or rock. The starting square may not be a food square. After the hole is drilled, the drilling piece disappears.

    A piece with the "drill" power can also dig sideways through rock, but then it disappears.

    
    
  5. Rock: The "rock" power costs 1 zorkmid extra. A piece with this power can turn itself to stone, after which the square it occupied becomes impassible to either player. It cannot become stone on a square that already contains either food or a hole.

Written by Ralph Betza. HTML conversion by David Howe.
WWW page created: January 23, 1999.