Game Review: Treasure Solitaire

One of the 2023 traditional deck contest's toughest offerings is Treasure Solitaire, a puzzle game that plays like a Flash puzzle game but is not as forgiving.

Themed to treasure hunting, you start with some rumors, search for clues and use these clues to try to confirm the rumors and find the treasure. Your first deal four rumors, then start each basic expedition by drawing 19 cards, laying 15 of them on a hexagonal map and using the remaining four cards as your hand.

Each turn you draw a card to your hand and use two cards in it to remove cards from the grid based on some comparison. You do this two more times with the goal of leaving a single card on the map that should match the last card in your hand in either suit or rank. If you succeed you keep the card on the table as your clue.

After six basic expeditions you gather your clues for the final expedition, where you match them against the rumors from earlier but only remove one card per term: extra matches become exhausted rumors. This time the goal is to expend all your cards to leave one unexhausted rumor, that becomes the treasure.

Failing this, you take one of the face-up rumors as your hunch, shuffle them with your clues and other face-up rumors and hope the card you draw is the one.

 

There is more skill involved in this game, with the only strong luck element being the lay of your hand as everything else is face up information. It's one thing to clear a grid of cards, it's another to leave a single matching card, so your moves have to take out the right chunks at a time and not split the map too much. Planning ahead doesn't get spoiled by a draw too often to become a problem.

There's a lot of planning ahead involved, not only in how to clear the grid but also in what card to try to get as a clue. Every move has consequences and they all come out in the final expedition. As I said, this is no easy game, and mistakes are costly. Taking risk isn't much of an option and zugzwang is even possible, e.g. the only options either clear the map early or split it too much. 

Something can be said about having to play six basic expeditions, that while they are all different, how well you do in one doesn't affect the next ones (only the final expedition) so the puzzling is the same throughout.

You can opt not to play the luck-based ending, in this mode losing a clue means losing the game as you need all six to make the final expedition possible. The game is hard enough as is so this extra challenge is a small change.

After rambling on about chess variant pieces I should also start talking more about variants in general. The internet has not only made chess more widespread, but it also gave a new avenue for variants that were only known in small circles mostly through the Chess Variant Pages. Recently, Chess.com and Lichess included variants in the games you can play in real time online, thus there's now more opportunities to play and analyze these hitherto rarely played games.

So, chess variants. Why? Games don't really just pop up out of nowhere (we're not going to get into the whole intellectual property thing) and most of them simply develop over time, where changes come and go until something sticks and we're stuck with it in an official level. The earliest roots of the chess as we know it came from India and its direct ancestor from Persia. Those games also count as variants, and so do the other descendants as they appear in places like China, Japan and Southeast Asia.

In terms of game design no one is really trying to make Chess 2. The classic game as we know it does have its share of problems that designers just can't help but want to tweak, but save for Fischer Random none of the proposals have gotten that much traction. A chess variant is expected to be "chess-like," whatever that means: usually "has king to mate" and "is still abstract strategy" is enough but even those two get done away with when needed.

Variants are also made for experimentation. Ralph Betza has done a lot of work on piece values and has created various games based on a single concept used to its full extent such as variants where pieces move differently depending on some condition it is in. As for compositions, variants come up to make some clever theme a reality, with some variants only working on a problem but not practical play (we'll gloss over retro for sanity's sake). The fun in fairy chess problems is in the use of ideas not possible in orthodox problems, may it be a theme or a geometric trick (some stipulations not in practical play are considered orthodox options in problem circles anyway)

For designers there is a certain paradigm in how a variant should work, while problemists are more interested in conjuring cool lines, whether or not the variant works in practical play. Grasshoppers are a favorite in compositions yet never featured in a dedicated game, but while game designers can't help but love the Xiangqi cannon, they rarely appear in compositions.

More importantly, though, the game has to be fun, or something worth playing in addition to chess. Variants appeal to those who already know chess, and the way they are presented includes allusions to the game everyone knows. There is no sense in trying to pass off a game that feels like chess as some new thing so the best it can do is be a nice extra game for the chess enthusiasts or be another game in the collection for the more general board game folk.

The Chess Variant Pages has already answered the question why play these variants, so I won't add to it any more, but let me conclude this mess this way: Amid the kinds of popular designer board games floating around in the scene, chess variant fans are happy enough to get something new.

 

Soxfan196o: When you just cannot wait for an autograph.
Noodley1: "WORLD IS MINE"
NotWinlogon: when your daughter thinks the arena is a stage
SirStabsalot: i'm about to sing this motherfucker a lullaby!
The Tainted Wisdom: "When someone disrespects your man in front of you"
Fluffy the Destroyer of Worlds: "Wait a second! Who's that!? It's Miku with a steel leek!"
panic lord: Tonight on WWE SUPERSLAM, pay for the seat, but you'll only need the EDGE. In the blue corner, she'll make you MIKU your MAKER.

anomynus: "Time for some text-to-screech action!"

Geodis: Before all those steel chair memes.
Zanthia: Come to Cosplay, they said. It will be fun, they said!

		2		3		2		2		9
		1								1
2								1		3
	2				1	3	2	3		11
	3		3				3			9
3		3		1			1			8
			2	2						4
	1				3					4
1			1		2	1				5

Chess Piece Essay: Mix and Match

In the world of generalized chess, anything goes. Chess variants have always introduced new pieces wherever applicable, and if they befit the game's needs. Not every piece will be as one-track as the pieces I've shown earlier; there's no restriction against going crazy with your pieces.

We will deal with hybrids, pieces made from combining movements from leapers, riders and hoppers. To clarify, if a piece does one leap forward and another kind of leap back, it is simply a compound leaper, for a piece to be a hybrid it has to be able to move in two different movement types.

The Simple Mix

Take one movement type and a different movement type, put them together, and you have a simple hybrid. The most notable examples are the knight hybrids commonly explored in more well-known chess variants. The common names for these are the Chancellor (Rook + Knight), Archbishop (Rook + Bishop) and the Amazon (Knight + Queen). As a piece with a Knight and Queen move can be a real monster, some games either try to neuter the piece or place it on a larger board, but there are also games that let the anarchy of an Amazon dictate play, fun but horribly unbalanced.

Not much can be said here that I haven't spitballed on the previous essays; hybrids function as two pieces at once though no one splits hairs at this level.

One Way, then Another

In orthodox chess a piece moves the same way wherever it is on the board whether it is capturing or not, the only piece not to do this is the pawn. 

Pieces whose moves depend on where it is on the board is as much of a topic under pieces as much as it is under board geography. Chinese chess for example has two features that affect how pieces play and some variants use board features to allow some moves that are not possible otherwise, so in this regard the two are intertwined.

A piece moving differently to capture isn't unusual: the pawn for example. The key point here is that the piece only moves a certain way to capture and would not do so otherwise. This then gives us the two general additions: 1) the piece can also capture with its non-capture moves but has additional moves when it captures, 2) the piece has different moves for non-capture and capture. 

Next factor is the direction the piece moves in. On a standard square board there are four main directions: left, right, forward and backward. Board geometry allows more directions than these but in practice these four directions define whether a piece can move a certain way, for example Betza's menagerie is filled with pieces defined this way. Tony Paletta made variants where pieces move depending on destination, and a piece can change movement depending on where it stands (commonly through squares of a color on a checkerboard).

In the hopper essay I have talked about conditional hoppers, though the condition in that case is in whether or not a hurdle is involved. Upon further review conditional hopping is more likely to make a piece a hybrid. In a broad sense this section may be about conditional movement, but convention has it that movement types depending on the piece's state are independent of each other and so we need not get too hung up on classifying such pieces; it is a better exercise to classify the conditions needed instead.

Morphin' Like Morphy

Pieces are expected to stay the same in chess. For these kinds of pieces let's disregard that for a bit and give them the ability to change. Thus follows the first question, into what? Conventionally a piece an only change to a piece that exists in the game; you cannot introduce a piece that should not exist. Next thing to consider is what triggers the change: a capture? being at a certain part of the board? merely moving? 

Parton created a variant that uses the morph cycle of pawn-knight-bishop-rook-queen-king which may have been the standard cycle for a while(not willing to pin Parton as the source yet).

The other way is for a capturing piece to change into the piece it captured, not to be confused with the capturing piece taking in its properties. In the former a rook capturing a bishop becomes a bishop, in the latter the same situation nets a queen.

In any case, the effects kick in after the change is complete

The Piece Moveth, the Piece Taketh

Pieces usually take as they move, that is their capture moves are the same as their normal moves. Displacement capture is taken for granted in chess that changing it is enough to make it a variant. 

Must a piece move to capture? An early variant with a different capture is Rifle Chess, where pieces capture enemies in their range without having to move, 

The first serious attempt at playing with more than one capture property is Ultima, giving everyone in the back row who isn't the king other means of capture, seven in total. Later variations trying to improve on Ultima added extra moves, like Rococo replacing some captures with three new ones. Having pieces move the same but take differently doesn't play like chess but is still chess-like albeit with a lot of queen lines.

A capture that has seen some use is that of jumping over pieces to capture them, analogous to checkers. There's even a variant dedicated to it, reminiscent of earlier variant Dynamo Chess.

Wait, What About the Pawn?

Most chess piece taxonomies label the pawn as a separate thing and sometimes add a sort of separate class of pieces based on pawns. This classification assumes variants that are meant to be played, but a pawn is still a piece anyway. A pawn is a sniper as the only piece to move different in a capture or non-capture, a short rider on the basis of its two-step first move but ultimately hops. Only pawns can promote but if a pawn is given enough power this can be done away with. 

In the end, a piece is a pawn by virtue of being the first line of defense in the starting position, expendable but nonetheless a vital part of the king's army.

Game Review: Club♣Fight

The first rule of Club♣Fight is to eliminate all the cards coming at you in a grid with your 13 cards by playing them in actions that remove cards from the grid. The second rule of Club♣Fight is that some moves are disabled if at least three cards of a suit appear on the grid.

Moves you can always do include removing every card matching the one you played, removing cards equal to the sum of the one you played or the inverse and playing a sequence of three cards to clear the grid. The card values are standard pip values with aces always low, there is also a joker that isn't worth anything and isn't any suit.

The special moves that can be blocked are removing a line of cards containing the card played (blocked by diamonds), playing a card and removing every card lower (2-7) or higher (7-K) than it (blocked by spades) and removing a sequence of cards that includes the card played (blocked by hearts).

First observation is that you should take out 3.1 cards per card played, easier said than done with nine visible card at most and the whole blocked moves affair limiting your attack output, but merely playing the most damaging move isn't enough, you have to remove the right cards lest you find yourself blocked: a grid with a 3-3-3 distribution in suits is not an uncommon sight.

The optimal moves are always the single card ones; clearing the grid may be useful tactically but is worth 3 cards per card, at least you have other ways to change the grid without being forced  to nuke.

Fun and unpredictable, this game is a quick diversion with a challenge.