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Lumberjack

Bruce Zimov wrote me about a chess variant, he invented in 1973. The game was played with much enthousiasm in Cincinnatti in a period where many chess variants were tried out there.

Rules

All pieces except pawns move according to the column they are on - following the movement of the type of piece that starts the game at that column in orthodox chess. So, a piece on the a-column or h-column moves as a rook; a piece on the b-column or g-column moves as a knight; a piece on the c-column or f-column moves as a bishop; a piece on the d-column moves as a queen; and a piece on the e-column moves as a king (but without the conditions on check), i.e., one square in an arbitrary direction.

Kings have their movement abilities affected, but not their `royalty'. So, for instance, a king on a4 moves as a rook, but still may not move to a square that is attacked by an opponents piece.

The purpose of the game is to check the king (so, not another piece on the e-column).

Pawns move as in orthodox chess.

Comments

A disadvantage of the game is that players will tend to have many pieces on the columns of queen and rooks (a, d, and h). Bruce Zimov wrote that the game becomes interesting when combined with another variant, like Alice.

Other popular variants of the inventor and friends were Lumberjack Giveaway (i.e., this game combined with Giveaway chess), and Lumberjack Putback Bingo, the rules of which will be described later this year on the Chess Variant pages.

Written by Hans Bodlaender, based on an email of Bruce Zimov.

WWW page created: June 2, 1997.

Categories and Details

Credits

Author: Hans L. Bodlaender. Inventor: Bruce Zimov.

Comments

Lumberjack. Pieces move depending on the column they are on. (8x8, Cells: 64)

adella hardy wrote on Fri, Mar 8 11:19 PM EST:

==== @ H.G.Muller,

       dear respected  h.g..muller,   you can't imagine how

much fun i it is to let the horse to follow a checker track

to fast move to enemy to checkmate. And you could pre-draw your checker ckm-line, for the horse to trot on, to enemy camp, to checkmate. so pleasant.

              Try it , hope you like it. 
         multi_jump-  knight checker----  (pa)4  mfF   sN
           Thanks so much  for your advice in coding.

sincerely, Adella.

adella hardy wrote on Fri, Mar 8 10:58 PM EST in reply to H. G. Muller from 03:20 AM:

===== @ Mr. H.G.Muller,

       Dear respected H.G.Muller,  Thanks for your

quick reply. Your advice is great and the checker

works well.

   ___ checker_multiple-Jump----    (pa)4 mfF 
   ____checker_multiple-capture--  -    c(pa)4

mfF

        ....Thanks so much for your advice, best

wishes. sincerely, Adella.

H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Mar 8 03:20 AM EST in reply to adella hardy from 03:07 AM:

(pa)mF would do it, where you can limit the number of jumps by putting a umber behind the parentheses. The jumps would not capture, though; to do that you would need (ca)mF.

The Diagram is designed for chess variants, though, not for checkers. Subtle checkers rules, such that you cannot jump over the same piece twice, cannot be implemented.

adella hardy wrote on Fri, Mar 8 03:07 AM EST in reply to H. G. Muller from 01:40 AM:

=== @Mr. H.G.Muller,

      Dear respected  H.G.Muller,  how to write:   multiple jumps of checker, mv only?  

     I designed this for checker variants.   For one- turn checker jump,  could write:  __  mpW,   or _  mpF

    But, for multiple, continuous, jumps of checker, how to express that?

Thanks so much, respected Mr. muller.
sincerely, Adella.

H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Mar 8 01:40 AM EST in reply to Bob Greenwade from Thu Mar 7 01:54 PM:

The recommended way for making Querquisite-like pieces is morphing. This game is in fact a special version of Avatar Chess, with a more regular morphing patters. Except that in Avatar the King was not morphing, because it was too difficult to checkmate it in thet case.

This seems to be solved here by making checking the King the goal here, rather than checkmating it? Wouldn't that be to easy?

The Interactive Diagram doesn't support checking as a winning condition. Currently the AI is not even aware that it is in check. (Except sometimes in nodes that would otherwise be leaves, when the last-moved piece delivers the check.) Perhaps I should change that, at least in the non-leaf nodes. (It is a rather large computational effort to detect every check and doing it in leave nodes would severely reduce the search speed.) Then for games where checking is the goal it could declare game end when it detects one.

In fact there could be two flavors of this: checking with a pseudo-legal move could be enough (as for King capture), the move would have to be legal (as for baring). In the variant 3-checks only the third check wins. I suppose the whole thing could be implemented by subtracting one royalty quantum from the royalty counter that the I.D. keeps track of incrementally whenever there is a check, which otherwise only happens when a royal is captured.

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https://www.chessvariants.com/diffmove.dir/lumberjack.html
First Created: Monday, June 2nd, 1997
Last Modified: Saturday, September 29th, 2001
File Timestamp: Wed, 14 Jul 2021 17:37:27 -0400
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