The "Five things I've done that you probably haven't" Meme

[jducoeur]

Coming late to the party, as usual, but what the heck:

1. Navigated for an airplane at age seven.
2. Demonstrated (the hard way) why one should always wear a bicycle helmet.
3. Built the first known board for a game that hadn't been played for ~700 years.
4. Written a technical article that was obsolete before it was published.
5. Proven that it is possible (if deeply unwise) to turn a single-player videogame into a multi-player one.

(Was going to list "Participated in every extant Carolingian guild", but on review there are still two or three I haven't done yet...)

Comments

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

Well, I feel a bit validated now, because those -- along with the weakness of the queen -- were my observations about the game.

The forced capture sounds kinda cool.

[jducoeur]

The weakness of the queen isn't peculiar to Byzantine -- that's standard Medieval chess. The modern hyper-powerful Queen came about only at the *very* tail end of SCA period.

Broadly speaking, period chess is like modern, except:

-- Queens move one space orthogonally;
-- Bishops have a short leap of two;
-- Some of the weird fiddly bits (castling, the initial pawn move) were occasional variants, rather than standard.

Overall, the result is a slower, more strategic game, with less of a tendency to turn suddenly...