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Hexagonal Board


C/CIF only supports games with cartesian coordinates, especially the piece definitions are only working with the four directions north, south, east, and west. For a support of hexagonal chess we will use a mapping to a board with square cells. For this mapping we follow the ideas from Arnaldo Rodrigues D'Almeida (see Hexagonal Chess Notation).

We start with an arbitrary hexagonal board, the lef-tmost column (rank) will be numbered with a, the second left-most becomes b, and so on. The bottom-most row becomes 1, the second bottom-most row becomes 2, and so on. The following hexagonal board serves as an example:

Now we have a simple mapping to a board with square cells, map all cells to a board with cartesian coordinates:

This surrogated board has a lot of air, but it allows a quite simple definition of the piece moves with MBN.

In our example any cell is horizontally connected by egdes, we call this kind of hexagonal boards horizontally oriented (because the King can move horizontally, but not vertically). In some other hexagonal boards (like the Gliński board) any cell is horizontally connected by vertices, this kind of board is called "vertically oriented (because the King can move vertically, but not horizontally).

Board Identification

For the determination of the board identification (see Board Identification) we will use the surrogated board, but we have to fill the air before we can do this. See next image, here all coordinates referencing an edge are filled with a yellow color. The board identification must not take care about the air, because on one hand these coordinates are unreachable (no piece can move to this square), and on the other hand this set of coordinates is computable. The latter is possible, as well as the reconstruction of the board, if we insert the information whether the hexagonal board is horizontally oriented, or vertically oriented, after the dimension (before the path description). We use 'h' for horizontal, and 'v' for vertical. Example: the board identification for the board above is 21x11h+15-r5=, the 'h' is the specifier for a horizontally oriented hexagonal board.

Here are some board identifications for the most widely known hexagonal boards:

Brusky 24x8h+f8+15-23-f9*
Chessex 29x15h+f7+17=
De Vasa 25x9h+f4+18-f13*
Gliński 11x21v+15-r5=
Hexabeast 9x19v+14-r5=
Hexshogi 9x19v
McCooey 11x21v+15-r5=
REX 19x9h
Shafran 9x19v+14-r5=
Starchess 9x13v+22-r4+12=

Default Promotion Zone

In vertically oriented hexagonal boards the default promotion zone is the last square in each column on surrogated board. And in horizontally oriented hexagonal boards the default promotion zone is the whole last rank on surrogated board.



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C/CIF at Sourceforge

C/CIF at Sourceforge

C/CIF at Launchpad

C/CIF at Launchpad