04-03-2024, 11:47 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-03-2024, 12:20 PM by Alain Busser.)
Hello,
Samantsy was seen by europeans at the beginning of the 20th century, in the Tanala Tribe:
I read both articles and see differences with the included game:
(they cannot be eaten by an enemy piece, not even by the enemy's king). Which confirms that the goal of the game is not to chessmate the king, but to block it.
To sum up, I think the following changes should be made to the script:
Some remarks about the names of the pieces:
Samantsy was seen by europeans at the beginning of the 20th century, in the Tanala Tribe:
- by Ralph Linton, in a 1933 book (but relating a 1926 expedition) titled the Tanala, a hill tribe of Madagascar where page 264 is a translation from
- Ardant du Picq who already saw this game as soon as 1912 (in the Tanala region) and described it in the bulletin de l'académie malgache (vol X, 1912, pp 267-268)
I read both articles and see differences with the included game:
- about the end of the game, du Picq writes
Quote:La partie est gagnée, quand le hova du camp adverse est bloqué.
- about the pawns, du Picq writes
Quote:Les zaza marchent [...] droit devant eux, en sautant ou sans sauter un nombre quelconque de carrés.
Quote:Ils prennent les pièces voisines sur les diagonales(they remove an enemy piece - other than the king, see below - as in classical chess). And once a pawn gets to the other side, it promotes to a queen and nothing else, which is the same than in ludii's versions.
- about the queen, du Picq writes
Quote:L'anakova marche diagonalement carré par carré et prend de même.
- about the king, du Picq writes
Quote:Les hova marchent carré par carré rectangulairement ou diagonalement et prennent de même.
Quote:Ils ne sont pris par aucune autre pièce et ne se prennent pas entre eux.
(they cannot be eaten by an enemy piece, not even by the enemy's king). Which confirms that the goal of the game is not to chessmate the king, but to block it.
To sum up, I think the following changes should be made to the script:
- change the pawn rule so that it can slide forwards, and not move forwards,
- change the queen rule so that it steps diagonally instead of sliding diagonally,
- change the endrule so that the once a king is blocked (regardless of the other pieces) the game ends,
- add as reference, du Picq's 1912 article,
- change the look of the board, as the diagram in Linton's chapter does not show colored cells, just a plain 8×8 grid.
Some remarks about the names of the pieces:
- the king is a hova who is more a baron (or even not noble at all) than a king
- the queen is hova's feminine version (anakova). Its moves are much like the ferz from shatranj which suggests that the game has been introduced by persans when they came to Madagascar.
- the bishops are basy (rifle balls, or blow guns) which evoque the arrows shot by the vizier in ancient versions of chess. The 2 steps move of this piece is the same than the alfil from shatranj, except that it can not jump over an other piece. This too, suggest shatranj as an ancestor of samantsy.
- the knights are called farasy which means horse. This word comes from kiswahili which again suggests an arab or persian origin of the game.
- the rooks are called vorona which means birds. Maybe because they can move farther than the other pieces?
- the pawns are called zaza which means children (the promotion to queen is when the child has grown up!). In shatranj the pawns are soldiers, as in any variant of chess I have seen, with only one exception, but not in Iran: the mongol version. There too the pawns are children. It would be strange if samantsy had mongol origins!