Escape from Lascatraz

|||

|||

Escape from Lascatraz

Lasca was conceived by Emanuel Lasker who obscured what he wanted to show, because he failed to see what he had in the first place. It happens to the best and I don't blame him. Lasker was a great Chess player, familiar with Go and several Draughts variants, clearly a lover of abstract games in general, philosopher, mathematician, world citizen and great human being. But as a games inventor he made the mistake of considering the mechanism of column checkers only within the framework of two existing games: Sjaski where he found it, and Checkers where he put it. When different concepts merge, the result may either be cross pollination or cross contamination. Here it was the latter.
The mechanism around which it all revolves is again a simple 'two men three squares' scenario of capture: you put a white man on the first square, a black man on the second, you leap with the white man to the third, taking along the black man as a prisonerlike this:
That is the bare essence.
Contrary to Checkers this bare essence implies that men don't leave the board and start organizing themselves in three dimensions - this explodes the network from a pinhead to a planet and puts the outcome of the quintessential implementation in the category of Go, rather than Checkers.

Column checkers was born in the wrong cradle. The cradle was the Russian 8x8 draughts variant Sjaski and the baby was named Bashne. It employs the rules of Sjaski, but instead of removing the jumped man, you take it along as a prisoner and think through the consequences as best you can. There must have been some vivid discussions in some Sjaski club in Russia, early in the nineteenth century.
On the premise that the column moves and captures as a whole, but only takes the top man in capture, columns arise that are composed of one or both colors, but never show a color in between the opponent's. For that to happen a player would have to capture his own men. The number of pieces decreases by one every time a lone man is captured, and there's no mechanism for increase. Hence the game is progressively going upward.
Guards can be captured themselves so prisoners may be released. Such a column of liberated men always starts out at its strongest, but making prisoners and losing guards in tactical involvement will in turn make it a target for the opponent to liberate his men - and the higher the column, the more dangerous the liberated piece, so feeding a doomed column would make sense. These were some of the observations they made. And there was promotion of course. It may have been the vodka, but they felt they couldn't do without it. The top man of a column would be crowned. A problem arose: they could mark the king on top, but what if a king disappears in a column? So what are we playing here, memory? It's a problem, think about it. Besides, can't you feel that something is wrong already? It's all very well for a king to be imprisoned by the opponent, but to still be imprisoned by your own men after the column has been liberated, to be hindered by their limited powers of movement, at the bottom of a column - am I the only one who smells a rat here? Never trust a game that hampers itself!
Sjaski features backward capture and thus a long range king. The flying king rule even states that if a man reaches the back rank in a capture, it may immediately proceed its capture as a king. So they put in long range columns on top of the already very complicated proceedings. Saying, as the Russian Chess historian Sargin did, that it is 'difficult to make correct calculations in Bashne' is putting it mildly indeed: there's an actual hazard of brain damage. Usually one fights an opponent and uses a game. Here it's the reverse.

The best part of a century later and along comes Emanuel Lasker, interested in new ideas as ever. He looks at the game and sees it's a shambles. But he knows Checkers. Here's the difference: Checkers permits a man neither to move nor to capture backward, so the reward for promotion is to simply grant those rights. It needs no long range king. It has a much simpler structure. It occurs to Lasker that it might provide a far better housing for column checkers. And he's absolutely right. That may have prevented him from looking better. How's that Shogi proverb again? If you find a good move, look for a better one? Anyway, column checkers seems to be quite happy, liberated from its freaky prison - or so it seems to Lasker. It settles quite happily in Checkers and becomes Lasca. Its housing is slightly smaller: a 25 cells Emergo type board with 11 men per side. It proves again that Lasker wanted to simplify the proceedings. He ultimately failed because the new baby still had its old rat: the kings imprisoned by their own men.
Lasca has been vigorously promoted because of its 'obvious superiority to Checkers', but although all players can be fooled at times, and some all the time, you can't fool all players all the time. Even though they may not have been able to put the finger on it, they surely sensed that something was wrong here. It may have led them to believe that it's inherent in the concept of column checkers, which in turn may have given it a reputation of not being a serious option for an elimination game. Lasca died a modern classic. It's time to actually bury it.

Emergo emerging
The first form of column checkers I encountered was locally called 'Indian Draughts' and played on a 10x10 board with 20 men per side. The host game, for a change, was Draughts, but without promotion. A piece reaching the other side would simply be immobile unless forced to make a backward capture. The draftsmen didn't stack very convincingly and it looked rather like a physical contest to keep things upright. I wasn't particularly enchanted. But then Ed van Zon drew my attention to some remarkably beautiful things that were going on in the game. By the time he had me convinced, I was also convinced that something was completely wrong with its implementation.
Ed made me see glimpses of the spirit of column checkers. Columns starting out strong, exchanging guards for prisoners in tactical involvement, and becoming critical again, decreasing numbers of pieces, increasing height of columns, the implicit upward rather than forward direction. I sensed the strategic implications of the tactics involved. The mechanism's own strategic implications in its natural upward direction. Height makes a piece important, regardless of its distribution of men, so it must be the prime focus in any position. Feeding makes a piece high - but you must then liberate it. I saw these glimpses through the framework of Draughts. Already did I look at a variant that excluded promotion. I was lucky the rat was out to begin with, but although I'd never seen it, the smell was still there. What's the good of reaching the other side and being immobile till forced to capture? What's forward direction got to do with it anyway. That's the key question Lasker failed to ask. Capture was backward already and promotion was out. The simplest behavior pointed at simply allowing movement and capture in all four directions. In terms of Lasca this means that all men are kings - and that strategy and tactics are no longer obscured by the distracting distinction. Increasing height will terminate the game all by itself, win or draw. This would simplify everything.
But there remained an obvious problem: how to get the men on the board. An initial position was out of the question because it suggests the very things I now considered to be contaminating the game. So I said: "well, let's enter the men one by one and see what happens".

Emergo in the making. Since all entered men are 'singe caps' - and thus weak - the focus was immediately on feeding as many men as possible to a single opponent's man, but only if it could be forced next to a covered man to remove the cap. Huge pieces emerged under these 'fuzzy rules', leaving the player who was forced to these multiple captures with huge amounts of men 'in hand', by the time his opponent had all men on the board. The option to have one player move pieces on the board while the other was still entering men one by one, seemed strategically imbalanced, so we decided to have him enter the remaining men as one huge stack which we immediately coined the shadowpiece because it would increase beside the board as a counterweight to the piece resulting from the opponent's feeding tactics. This certainly was a balancing principle, but it was not yet under control. The entering stage would sometimes lead straight into a four or five piece endgame with two enormous columns. This was unsatisfactory, but a ban on feeding proved inconsistent with allowing attack. A ban on both would create a hard edge separation between both stages and suffocate the entering stage. That didn't feel good at all.
"Don't worry", I said to Ed, "there's a rule here somewhere, it'll come".

I had come to the point where I was certain I read the concept correctly. There had to be a rule to govern this in a balanced way, to avoid a feeding frenzy while interweaving both stages - and it had to be simple. When it finally dawned on me I turned to Ed and said: "listen, when entering, you're not allowed to feed, unless you're already under attack". In other words, you cannot force your opponent into a capture, unless he did give you that option on his previous move. I saw Ed's face light up in an 'aha-erlebnis'. Emergo was born.
Minor problems remained. Our original estimate of 2x12 men on the 41 dark squares of a 9x9 board has never suggested any want of improvement.
The shadowpiece easily gained its balance under the new rule and is now an intrinsic part of entering strategy. There was another detail at the beginning. By playing the center-cell as his first move, white would make the adjacent four cells at least temporarily inaccessible for black, and thus get an unfair control over the center. Therefore the center is prohibited for white on his first move. If he wants to prevent black from entering there, he can play on an adjacent square, and black can do the same on his first move, to likewise restrict white.

Emergo was an immediate success at Fanatic and the logic of the entering stage and its smooth and intricate connection with the movement stage in terms of both strategy and tactics, were greatly appreciated. Also, there was an immediate understanding that strategy for the entering stage - apart from being the least understood - was different for black and white.

Then the new born was actually smothered by its hexagonal twin that I came up with by running the usual checklist and hitting 'variants'. Flawless, flawless, flawless, this translation to the 37 cell hexagonal grid, and lo and behold: a choreography of unbelievable tactics! Well, there's only a limited amount of attention in the world - games inventors can tell you all about it - and HexEmergo immediately took over. Soon it was actually called Emergo, and its twin became 'the square one'. At the time I agreed wholeheartedly. Two factors kept the outrageous tactics in check: an simple strategy and limited powers of calculation on the players' side. It was hard to get trough all the consequences of certain actions, particularly in the middle game. Calculating up to a sub-goal seldom meant the combination's end. Compulsory capture could carry it on like a whirlwind. I remember once demonstrating the game and combining myself off the board because I'd calculated up to a particular decapitation and taken the rest for granted. Those were the days.
With Emergo as a stepping stone HexEmergo wasn't to difficult to understand. In retrospect I can see that presenting it up front, for instance in Games magazine and in Wayne Schmittberger's 'New Rules for Classic Games', may just have been too baffling a concept to find a large following. Moreover, the game is flawed. Ed showed that quite convincingly. Playing here is a form of correspondence play: you can actually work out promising lines to an otherwise unattainable plydepth - capture is compulsory and as long as you keep the initiative, you opponent can do little more than grind his teeth and follow. Playing white, Ed simply focused on making black enter last, and followed up by a painstaking and almost invariably successful trial and error search for an immediate wipe out on his first free move. This soon proved that HexEmergo is a white win in correspondence play.
These last events happened fairly recently. It made me rethink Emergo. I had neglected it because the whirlwind tactics of its twin had always taken the spotlight. But HexEmergo is over the top: it ultimately makes implementing the basic strategy of feeding, decapitating and burying too easy because its freedom of movement allows almost unlimited initiative, provided you get things rolling and know where you're heading - if not behind the board, then surely in correspondence play.
In Emergo Ed's entering strategy proved far less successful. It's possible to get the move, but not the wipe-out. Though entering strategy in itself is far from unambiguous, this nasty little devil doesn't work against adequate countermeasures such as effectively anticipating and blocking possible feeding combinations. In HexEmergo this always proved an inhuman task. More than that, strategy and tactics are indeed far better balanced. There are more positional aspects to be considered in terms of strategy. The credo is as always 'feed, decapitate, bury', but the means to implement it are less unrestricted and more subtle than in the hexagonal game. Tactics actually have greater diversity, clarity and depth - they serve strategy without dominating it.