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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Variations of Arimaa?
        
(Message started by: minderbinder on Apr 26^th, 2012, 1:36am)

Title: Variations of Arimaa?
Post by minderbinder on Apr 26^th, 2012, 1:36am

I'm curious if anyone has any interesting ideas on creating variations of Arimaa, and I also wanted to know what people think of an idea I had for a variation intended to switch up the pace of the game.

In particular I've been thinking about the slow, strategic gameplay of Arimaa and about how to make it quicker and more immediately tactical, just for a change of pace. The idea I came up with was pretty simple: instead of each player arranging their own pieces at the start of the game, they arrange their opponent's pieces instead (one other change will be needed, I think, but I'll get to it in a moment).

The idea is that this will mean that each player will start off with a row of rabbits in front and their stronger pieces behind, so they will have to push a few rabbits forward before developing. With vulnerable rabbits in the middle I was hoping that it would force players to attack immediately with more pieces and lead to a quick brawl.

I chose this instead of just mandating that rabbits go in front for a few reasons:

1. If players could arrange their back row, they could group all the strongest pieces in one area and hence develop quickly by pushing only one rabbit out. But if their opponent splits the strong pieces, it could force players to push out several rabbits to develop quicker.

2. It prevents players from selecting a favorite opening and sticking to it because it is the opponent who chooses the arrangement.

3. I just like the sound of it better ;D

Of course, now that piece development is a central issue, it seems like the first player will have a big advantage. So the second change I thought would make sense is to have the first move of the first player to be only 2 steps instead of 4, to make the development race a dead heat.

So I was wondering what you guys think of it. My fear is that this would mean that the initial gameplay would focus much more heavily on a few pieces with most pieces kept essentially out of view, and that the game could quickly devolve into a rabbit-snatching race, but I don't know.

Title: Re: Variations of Arimaa?
Post by Fritzlein on Apr 26^th, 2012, 11:40am

There have been many variations of Arimaa proposed. The only one that has grabbed my interest is reduced material, where instead of starting the game with 16 pieces each, the players start with only 13 (clueless played this variant for a while) or even fewer down to just 6 (four rabbits and two cats). Reducing material achieves your stated objectives. It makes the game quicker and more immediately tactical. Rabbit advances happen, not because we somehow mandate them, but because they are strategically good on a thinned out board. Arimaa endgames provide all the headlong rushes and tactical fireworks anyone's heart could desire. The problem you are trying to address has already been cleanly and effectively solved. :) You simply need to experiment with how much material needs to be off the board to raise the tactical temperature to the level that feels right to you.

Some speculation about your proposal:

1) If Gold got both the second setup and the first move, it would indeed be an unfair advantage. I think you are quite right that Gold would have to be handicapped in some way to compensate.

2) It is possible that there would be less variety of openings, because it is easier to agree on the worst opening setup than it is to agree on the best opening setup.

3) Swarming games can turn into very slow, strategic contests. The elephants can deadlock around a single trap, leading to a highly positional struggle as to which elephant will be able to break free first. Thus advanced rabbits in and of themselves don't make for a quick game.

4) The slow games of 2004 and 2005 (when I first started playing Arimaa ) were due to an unwillingness of either player to commit any piece forward other than the elephant. We called them "dual lone elephant" openings, or "rabbit-pulling" openings, because the only thing an elephant can do by itself with the other elephant watching is pull a rabbit. Given our strategic mindset of those days, having rabbits forward would have greatly sped up the openings by giving the lone elephant an easy target. Nowadays, however, almost every player is eager to advance a horse along with the elephant. Rabbit-pulling has become questionable, in part because you might not have time to spare for it, but more critically because you might be helping the opponent swarm one of your traps. Thus the "boredom" of dual-lone-elephant openings has mostly fixed itself due to the natural progression of Arimaa theory: hardly anybody plays those openings any more.

Title: Re: Variations of Arimaa?
Post by omar on Apr 28^th, 2012, 12:34pm

I'm starting to lose track of the many Arimaa variations that have been proposed :-) Maybe someone can catalog them in the wiki.

Your variation reminds me a bit of Losing Arimaa. In fact it would be interesting to combine this setup with Losing Arimaa. But it's hard for me to say anything about a game just from it's rules; I always have to play it and see how it feels. I'm not a game whisperer :-)

Title: Re: Variations of Arimaa?
Post by minderbinder on Apr 28^th, 2012, 10:35pm

@ Fritzlein: I hope you haven't gotten me wrong, I'm not trying to "solve" a "problem" with Arimaa... It's fantastic as is. I'm just trying to build a variation with a little bit of a different feel.

@ Omar: Even if you say you're not the game whisperer, the evidence says you actually are... after all you did invent Arimaa ;)

Title: Re: Variations of Arimaa?
Post by ocmiente on Apr 29^th, 2012, 10:17pm

Please check this old thread for other variants. (http://arimaa.com/arimaa/forum/cgi/YaBB.cgi?board=talk;action=display;num=1284768307;start=1#1)

I was thinking about stretching the board during one of the world championship games. I haven't done it, but it seems like adding three rows and two traps would stretch out the pieces, reducing congestion. I am curious to know what the average number of turns would be for this variant vs. the original.

Title: Re: Variations of Arimaa?
Post by minderbinder on Apr 30^th, 2012, 1:14am

Thanks for the link ocmiente, those variations are quite interesting, especially the discussion about the Mouse/Rat. I agree that it would be difficult to play offensively with the mouse/rat, but this might be fixed by widening the board, adding more traps, and changing the piece counts to include two elephants. That way the mouse couldn't handle both elephants at once and depending on mouse placement we could get rapid attacking games like in chess when black and white castle on opposite sides ("pawn storm" matches).

But then if we widened the board, we might have to lengthen it too... In fact, here's a (crazy) idea I just had, inspired by your idea of stretching the board:

A 17x11 board, with 15 traps arranged in the usual pattern (with one trap at the center of the board, and then radiating outward in the usual grid - each player would have 5 home traps, and there would be 5 "neutral" traps in the center).

Each player gets two normal Arimaa sets plus an extra rabbit and a mouse (so two elephants, ..., 17 rabbits, and a mouse)

What I'm thinking will happen is this: both sides will rush out to claim center traps on the sides that they have placed their mice. Since Gold gets first turn, likely Silver will choose to do an imbalanced mice setup so as not to lose the entirety of the center traps to Gold's superior tempo. The very central trap will then be contested, as well as both sides rushing to destroy their opponent's weaker flank and push a rabbit through.

But of course this doesn't address the biggest problem of the mouse/rat variation... the notation! We already use M for caMel and R for Rabbit. How would we notate a game? It's hopeless ;)

EDIT: I just noticed I missed the second mouse/rat discussions where you use O for the mouse (not to mention playtest results). Oops. Anyhow, I'm still curious about the stretched board since the addition of "neutral" traps would probably fundamentally alter gameplay. Especially if there were an odd number of traps.

EDIT 2: I also thought a bit about the "arimaaspiel" variations, and I have a funny idea: "strategaa" where the only changes would be that the sprites for your opponents' pieces would be replaced by plain circles. Is that advancing piece a rabbit trying to make a goal shot? Or maybe it's a dog trying to coax you into sending a cat to intercept so it can nab it! Only one way to find out :) Oh and in case you're wondering why I'm frantically thinking up random variations of Arimaa at 4:30 in the morning, this is what happens when I have too much coffee while studying