Comments by JohnAyer

Use caution. Mr. Jelliss's description of Modern Courier Chess is seriously at variance with all other sources I have seen. This game appears on chessvariants.com as Courier Spiel.

Of course the printable board and pieces for the Courier Game will also serve for this one.

I think that 'henchman' would be a more idiomatic translation from the German than 'commoner' or 'man' but it seems a bit late in the day to suggest that.

This reproduces EXACTLY the starting position of Carrera's variation of some four hundred years ago.

The Persian poet Firdausi, in his epic history of Iran, the Shah-nameh, or Book of Kings, gives a story of the invention of chess, and the form invented has these same pieces on the same ten-square board, but the camels are placed between the elephants and the horses, on the C and H files, and the pawns are so clearly described as standing before and behind the pieces that I wonder whether he meant each player had twenty pawns, arranged on his first and third ranks, with the pieces on his second rank.

If we call the armed female attendants Qalmaqini, and the bishop-knight a Bukhshi, then the king is called Shah instead of Padshah (emperor), and they are arranged Bukhshi, Wazir, Shah, Shahzadeh from left to right across each player's four central squares on the home-row. Murray says the version shown in the diagram above is the corrected version, but this other arrangement has its own internal logic. Probably there was some experimenting.

According to the sixteenth chapter of _The Chessmen of Mars_, the piece known elsewhere on Barsoom as the Flier is called in Manator the Odwar, but has the same powers as the Flier. To be blunt, the odwar can leap. <p>Jetan fits the Freudian theory of chess much better than chess does. Freud's theory was that a player's queen represents his mother, and this is why he guards her with such great care. In fact, of course, a chess-queen is in no way feminine, and a player protects his queen because she is his most powerful piece—but he must be prepared to sacrifice his queen if his play demands it. The princess in Jetan, on the other hand, is powerless, and a player must protect her absolutely, because to lose her is to lose absolutely.

Another line of modification would be to eliminate the commander and one queen (and their pawns) on each side, move the survivors to an 8 by 10 board, and put the emperors between the rooks and the knights. This would keep the knights at the usual distance from the center, and the pawns at the usual distance from the last rank. It also reduces the number of pieces with the bishop's move from seven (three capable of moving on either color) to five (one capable of moving on either color). Unfortunately, it puts the emperors facing one another along the diagonals, but I'm not convinced that would be a major problem on this layout. <p>Please read all previous comments (click on the button) before commenting further.

My son and I dislike the pawn promotion rules in this game, and have our own: A pawn reaching the last rank is immediately promoted to the rank of the master-piece of that file, except that a pawn promoting on the king-file is made a prince, moving as the squirrel. Thereafter, if the king is checkmated, he is removed from the board, the prince succeeds, and the game continues. This is idle speculation, though; neither of us has ever allowed the other to promote a pawn.

I suppose the name refers to the meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin in Yalta during World War II.

Hugo Legler, about 1923, called this piece an archbishop, and S. S. Blackburn, about the same time, called it a pegasus.

The piece on the g-file appears in the original as Aanca, rendered by both Murray and Gollon as Gryphon.

Castling is not mentioned in the only source. That's all I can tell you.

Further on the same theme, how about moving to the 8x12 Courier Game board, with the king, queen, bishops, and knights arranged as usual in the central files, the rooks at the corners, the emperors next to them (which will avoid the problem of shared diagonals), and, since we have seven line-riders already, put a centaur and a squirrel on the c and j files? Any thoughts? Anyone know how to set it up to test?

Here is something I found posted in a Gnostic interpretation of chess and its history. The web source is http://www.goddesschess.com/chessays/calvognosis2.html . I have, as usual, corrected punctuation, spelling, capitalization, spacing, and such superficial matters: <p>The German historian Johannes Kohtz (1843-1918) supposed that in the protochess the Rook was also a jumping figure, with a mobility limited to a third square. So the squares accessible to a Rook in h1 would be f1 and h3, and later in the game f3, d3, d1, b1, b3, b5, d5, f5, h5, h7, f7, d7 and b7. His theory makes a lot of sense (in spite of Murray's rejection after long arguments by post), because the three jumping pieces (Alfil, Knight, and Rook) represent a diagonal, hook-curved and rectilinear movement of the same range. It also expresses a perfect ranking order: The King and the Knight are the only pieces which can move to any of the 64 squares. The Firzan has half of the board, 32. The Rook half of that, 16 squares. And the Alfil, half of that, 8. <p>The striking fact, unnoticed by Kohtz in his last work of 1917, is that a jumping Rook produces also the same magic sum of 260 in the Safadi or in the Mercury board. For instance: 57-6-43-24-40-27-54-9=260. The same happens in the previous and more widely known magic square of Mercury. The four corners of each quadrant of 4x4 in the magic board sum half of the constant, 130. This reinforcement of Kohtz's theory seems to me decisive. <p>The marvellous Safadi board has, in all probability, predetermined the different movements and classes of pieces in protochess. However, once the Arabs acquired the game from the Persians, the Rook evolved into a long range piece, becoming the most powerful element of the chess army. This evolution can be explained logically as a necessity once the idea of checkmate has appeared, again according to Kohtz. In the first legend of Firdawsi, the game re-discovered by Buzurdjmir was as follows: 'The sage has invented a battlefield, in the midst (of which) the king takes up his station. To left and right of him the army is disposed, the foot-soldiers occupying the rank in front. At the king's side stands his sagacious counsellor advising him on the strategy to be carried out during the battle. In two directions the elephants are posted with their faces turned towards where the conflict is. Beyond them are stationed the war horses, on which are mounted two resourceful riders, and fighting alongside them on either hand to left and right are the turrets ready for the fray.' <p> Note from John Ayer: 'turrets' is a definite mistranslation and anachronism. <p> By the number of pieces it is easy to know that in this game the board was of 8x8 squares, though nothing is said about the rules of movement or the aim of the game. This gap is filled in the second Firdawsian chess legend about two half brothers Gau and Talhend (two typical Persian names), the latter being killed by the former during a civil war. To explain to the queen of 'Hend' who was the mother of both how her son came to die, the game of chess, which represented a battle, was invented. But it is a different game. The board is 10x10 and had perhaps a dividing line in the middle, as in today's Chinese chess, because the text says: 'This (the game) represents a trench and a battle field onto which armies had been marched. A hundred squares were marked out on the board for the manoeuvring of the troops and the kings' which is also a board of 10x10 cases, where is impossible to build a 'perfect Caissan magic square' like Safadi's. This time the movement of the pieces is described. There are three pieces jumping to a third square in diagonal, rectilinear or hook-curved direction. But there is a fourth piece which was the most powerful of all: 'None could oppose it, but it attacked everywhere in the field'. <p>This piece must be the long-ranging Rook, the most powerful figure of the set. Again according to Kohtz's theory, instead of the previous jumping Rook, the long-ranging Rook was adopted as well in the 8x8 board as a necessity once a checkmate becomes the main goal of the game. Check and check-mate have already appeared, as the beautiful text explains: <p>'If a player saw the king during the struggle he called out aloud, 'King, beware!' and the king then left his square, continuing to move until he was hemmed in. This occurred when every path was closed to the king by castle, horse, counsellor or the rest of the army. The king, gazing about in all directions, saw the army encircling him, water and trenches blocking his path and troops to left and right, before and behind. Exhausted by toil and thirst, the king is rendered helpless; that is the decree whch he receives from the revolving sky.' <p>Where did the new idea came from? Since the moment when the fate of the king decides the victory in the game, the value of this piece increases enormously because of its 'divinization' and inviolability. In a way, chess has become a monotheistic game. The cultural atmosphere in ancient Persia fits well with the implicit idea. In contrast to Greece, were a king was only 'primus inter pares', basically equal in his human nature to his subordinates, a Persian 'Shahanshah' was worshiped almost as a God. 'The ruler possessed a special quality in the eyes of his subjects, which was called 'farn' or 'farr' in New Persian, 'farrah' in Middle Persian, 'xvarana' in Avestan. Originally meaning 'life force', 'activity' or 'splendour', it came to mean 'victory', 'fortune' and specially the royal fortune' (R. Frye.op.cit. p.8) <p>There is a well known story in the biographies of Alexander the Great. At his beginning, he was a 'normal' Greek leader, but after conquering the Persian throne he warmed to the way Persian courtiers treated him as a God. He intended to receive the same 'proskinesis' from his countrymen, but Callisthenes refused to genuflect and was murdered in revenge by Alexander's hand. The 'agon' in chess and its voluntaristic message points basically to a Hellenistic background. But 'Shah-mat' in chess, an expression which has kept its Persian root in all languages during the chess evolution, may have its origin in the influences irradiating from Persian cultural ground. <p> End of quotation. The description of the king perishing of exhaustion and thirst seems to me to be strongly influenced by the miserable fate of the Imam Husayn at Karbila. Note that, while 'Shah mat' does indeed mean 'The king is dead,' the king cannot actually be killed, and the Persian phrase is a corruption of 'Shah-i-mandaz,' 'The king is helpless.' <p>Now, assuming this conjecture, we have a pre-chess on an eight-square board with king and ferz in the central files, flanked by alfil, knight, and dabbabah, with single-step pawns on the second rank. The conjecture assumes that check and checkmate had not appeared, so perhaps the battle was to the annihilation of one side. Does anyone consider this a reasonable conjecture? I will welcome any actual discussion, whether favorable or otherwise to the hypothesis. <p>According to Murray's _History of Chess_, one early attempt to improve chaturanga, while still in India, was to change the alfil to a dabbabah.

I propose that this game can be derived from the pre-chess or proto-chess described in a note to chaturanga by adding our rook to the outside of that array and then squaring off the board and adding two more pawns. From this game chaturanga can be derived by moving it back to the eight-square board and dropping the orthogonal-leaping camel (our dabbabah) or alternatively the alfil from the array and giving its place to the rook. From this game, Shatranj al-Kamil Type One, I think we can also derive the early form of Chinese chess, which was played on a board of eleven lines by eleven, that is, ten squares by ten. The rooks, or chariots, are retained unaltered. The elephants retain their move unaltered, except that it is now limited by the river, but I doubt the river existed on the earlier board. The horses retain their native move in slightly modified form. The orthogonal-leapers, camels in this game but dabbabahs to us, become pieces that leap orthogonally to capture, moving like rooks the rest of the time. The king and minister probably had the same moves as in the original game; the nine-castle was not found on that earlier board.

I have a conjecture about the origin of Chinese Chess. It is known that there was an earlier version, played on a board ten squares by ten, uncheckered; Murray reproduces a reconstructed arrangement by Karl Himly, with the 'king' and 'queen' arranged fore-and-aft in the nine-castle. This is a crucial (in many ways!) error. The current Chinese Chess board, eight squares by nine with a nine-castle at each end and a river across the middle, is known to be older than Chinese Chess, and to have been used for two previous games. There is therefore no basis for drawing the nine-castle on the ten-by-ten-square board for the earlier version. There is also no basis for believing that the earlier board contained a central river. Take them away, and we have the plain ten-by-ten-square board of so many variants, including Shatranj al-Kamil I. It also has the same pieces as Shatranj al-Kamil I: A king, his attendant minister, two elephants moving as alfils, two knights or horses, two rooks, and two orthogonal leapers, with a front rank of pawns. I think therefore that when Chaturanga was introduced into China in the time of the Wei-ti Emperor, and he had the two players beheaded and forbade the use of any game with a piece representing an emperor or called such, Chaturanga was indeed driven out of China. A couple of centuries later Shatranj al-Kamil Type One was introduced along another trade route from Persia. Perhaps the players were informed of the previous edict, or perhaps it was just their native prudence that persuaded them to demote one king to governor and the other to general, each with his appropriate officer. They then moved the game to a native board, abandoning the race game for which that board must have been quite inconvenient. Since the commander-in-chief and his adjutant were now inside a fortress, they were forced to stay within its walls. The elephant, huge, heavy, and one imagines heavily laden, was ruled unable to cross the river. The orthogonal leaper was changed from a camel to a catapult, or cannon, capable of destroying its victim even past a screen, but moving along the ground. The rook, or chariot, was left unchanged, and the pawn and horse were slightly modified for reasons that I don't see. <p>The odd thing is that Murray almost worked this out himself; he remarked on the great similarity between the earlier Chinese game of chess and the Persian variants. I think it was only the spurious nine-castle on Himly's diagram that prevented him from seeing the obvious.