Semedo (chess)

Semedo (Latin: Semedo) — a variant of chess, presumably invented by Álvaro Semedo.

Description

Some chess historians dispute the existence of such chess in general. Supposedly invented by a Jesuit missionary in China, Álvaro Semedo. Subsequently, other Catholic missionaries in China reported a special chinese chess called "semedo". A description of this game in latin is given in a book published in 1694 in England.[1][2]

Rules

Board

Initial semedo alignment (♔ ♚ — kings, ♕ ♛ — scientists, ♘ ♞ — knights, ♙ ♟ — pawns, ◬ ⟁ — rockets):

8 ♞ ♛ ♚ ♛ ♞
7 ⟁ ♟ ♟ ♟ ⟁
6 ♟ ♟
5
4
3 ♙ ♙
2 ◬ ♙ ♙ ♙ ◬
1 ♘ ♕ ♔ ♕ ♘
a b c d e
gollark: It has some very nice things for the cloud-thing/CLI tool/server usecase; the runtime is pretty good and for all garbage collection's flaws manual memory management is annoying, and the standard library is pretty extensive.
gollark: I'm not entirely sure what the aim is - maybe they originally wanted to go for highly concurrent systems or something, but nowadays it seems to mostly be used in trendy cloudy things, servers, command line utilities, that sort of thing.
gollark: I think my use cases are nice usecases, and I think it has flaws even in the domains it seems to be targeted at.
gollark: I think it should at least not, essentially, deliberately cripple itself at some classes of thing.
gollark: I'm not sure exactly what they're targeting - maybe trendy cloud™-type tools, simple webservers, etc - but even *in* that domain it just seems bad to me.

References
  1. Hyde T. Mandragorias: seu Historia Shahiludii. Oxford, 1694.
  2. http://books.google.com/books?id=JHdUAAAAcAAJ
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