crust wrote:It would be interesting to try out Adam's idea of naval rachunek tafl, where the king represents an unarmed capital ship, and the "throne" is just an ordinary square, with no special features (apart from the fact that the "king" just happens to start on that square).
Yeh, I'm ready to help test this idea, a variant that could be called "Sea battle tafl"?
Maybe we could discuss a few issues beforehand to save work.
The game crust outlines, is identical to Rachunek on an 11x11 board. Only difference is the center square being an ordinary square. This is a small difference and would probably have as little influence on the game as would a small wave on the sea surface, I think. Our experience with Rachunek 11x11 is that the number of attackers are overwhelming to the defenders, who therefore loose.
If the Sea battle tafl is to be played on an 9x9 board, it is again Rachunek with the small difference of the center square. We know that Rachunek 9x9 as a game works well; we also know, I think, that Rachunek 9x9 is a rather complicated game. Adam considers the Sea battle tafl to be used at an exhibition in Norway, targeted at young children and on a 7x7 or 9x9 board with very large squares. It could of course be that the Rachunek rules would still be a fun game for children, even if we may find it complicated.
If the Sea battle tafl is actually Rachunek tafl, it's not so much needed to program it as a new variant.
However, the detail of the unarmed capital ship bothers me. This is a Viking fleet. If the capital ship is a royal ship, it is of terrible power, largest ship on sea and manned with the king's best men, his hird. Here is one of them, manned with 100 men, the wreck was found on the bottom of Roskilde Fjord, Denmark:
The Sea Stallion of Glendalough
If the capital ship is a chieftain's ship, it's also the most powerful ship in the fleet.
If we suppose this powerful capital ship is by all means armed, can sink enemy ships and must be surrounded from 4 sides to be captured, it will easily reach the board edge, escaping into the horizons. What to do about the balance then? Ships' movements could be limited to one square per move. This is a known tafl rule from small tafl boards. Or movements could be 1-3 squares per move. Or maybe only the especially well built capital ship can move 1-3 squares per move. Something like this?
- But, I believe that the variant, which Adam is looking for for the exhibition, is precisely the Rachunek which crust outlines above, and that it will work well for the purpose.
crust wrote:Can't seem to get it to work at the moment though.
- I had live play Berserk test games against some opponents, and currently a correspondence Berserk game against Roderich.
However, Roderich had to shift to the Firefox browser as Explorer did not work with this software.