bcardoso / shoggy

A fairy chess game for Emacs

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shoggy

shoggy is a 6x6 board, fairy chess variant with spell cards, written in Emacs Lisp.

shoggy was developed during the Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024.

• https://bcardoso.itch.io/shoggy

Requirements

• GNU Emacs 29.3 with SVG support (probably runs on older versions too)
• There are no third-party packages required.

Installation

;; Manual install
;; clone this repo:
;; git clone https://github.com/bcardoso/shoggy
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/shoggy")
(require 'shoggy)

;; With use-package + straight.el
(use-package shoggy
  :straight (shoggy :host github :repo "bcardoso/shoggy"
                    :files (:defaults "images" "sounds")
                    :build (:not compile))) ;; compiler won't be happy

How to play

M-x shoggy RET

You can adjust and toggle some game options in the main screen.

The rules

• No checks, no castling: when the Sage is captured, the game ends!
• No en passant: pawns can move one or two squares in their first move (you can toggle this behavior), and that’s it.
• When a player is out of moves, it’s game over.
• In each turn, you can either move a piece or cast a spell: you are given a spell card after every capture.
• You can’t hold more than 3 cards at a time: cards are randomly discarded if your hand is full.
• All else is pretty much chess.

The pieces

shoggy has standard and non-standard pieces:

Name	Atom	Range	Value	Description
Pawn	P	1 or 2	1	A pawn
Ferz	F	1	2	Advisor, like a 1 square bishop
Wazir	W	1	2	Like a Rook, also moves 1 square
Knight	N	2,1	3	2,1 Leaper
Rook	R	board	5	Same as a Rook
Sage	S	1	99	Like a King, but wiser

The spells

After each capture of an enemy’s piece, you earn a spell card. In your turn, you can either move a piece or cast a spell.

There are three types of spells (for now):

Spell	Description
BOOST	Boost a piece’s range (applies to Ferz or Wazir)
PROMOTE	Promote a piece (Pawn -> Ferz/Wazir -> Knight -> Rook)
DEMOTE	Demote an enemy piece (Rook -> Knight -> Ferz/Wazir -> Pawn)

The engines

shoggy has two engines to play against: dumbfish and sanefish.

dumbfish

tries to capture pieces or makes random moves

sanefish

tries to be a more reasonable fish (the default)

The lore

shoggy was loosely inspired by Shogi, a Japanese chess variant (which you can play online at https://lishogi.org/).

At first I was planning to make a Minichess/Los Alamos chess variant, but I soon started to deviate into other directions.

I also had this idea a long time ago about adding playing cards into the game of chess. Perhaps in the future I’ll add some more spell cards to shoggy. Also, check out Knightmare Chess, which I discovered during my research of the Game Jam.

So there are hundreds of chess variants and fairy chess pieces out there. This is my own :)

• List of chess variants
• Shogi variants
• Fairy chess piece
• List of fairy chess pieces
• Chess Programming Wiki

Acknowledgements

I’m thankful to the creators mentioned below for sharing their work under free and open-source licences.

Images

• Piece art: Pixel Chess Pieces by Lucas312 (CC3.0)

Sounds

• Splash screen: button select.wav by MakoFox (CC3.0)
• Board start: Board Start.mp3 by el_boss (CC0)
• Piece move: chess_move_on_alabaster.wav by mh2o (CC0)
• Piece capture: Piece Placement.mp3 by el_boss (CC0)
• Boost spell: Dialogue box.wav by MakoFox (CC3.0)
• Promote/Demote: Puzzle piece placed on board by el_boss (CC0)
• Card vanish: Shuffle cards by Breviceps (CC0)
• Game end: chess-piece-bounce.ogg by pbimal (CC0)