Arimaa – The next Challenge

Raj on July 27th, 2009

Did you heard of a board game were the board contains rabbits, cats, dogs, horses, camel and elephant, these animals try to pull and push each other and the rabbit tries to run across them and reach the target ultimately to achieve “Goal”! In this field all the animals are scared of the 4 traps! Sounds like a jungle book or a kid’s game? Certainly not! This is a board game similar to chess! Sounds interesting?! This series of my article speaks about my experience and journey in the Animal battle game called Arimaa!

Arimaa is a board game like Chess. It requires same board and number of pieces with minor alteration.
Let’s see how this game is linked so much with Chess.

Board
The Game uses 64(8×8) squares
All squares have same color except 4 squares.
The 4 squares (c3, c6, f3 and f6) are called traps.

Pieces
Pieces are divided into 2 groups of 16 dark pieces and 16 light pieces.
Dark and light are called in chess but in Arimma we call them as Gold and Silver.
In chess the pieces are 1 King, 1 Queen, 2 Bishops, 2 Knights, 2 Rooks and 8 Pawns. Arimaa also it has same numbers and pares but name of the pieces are changed, they are Elephant, Camel, Horse, Dog, Cat and Rabbit.

Equipment,
You no need to buy anything! The Standard Chess set will do. Open your chess board, place 4 coins in c3, c6, f3 and f6 square. These squares are the trap squares. Your chess pieces are considered like this:
Chess | Arimaa
King | Elephant
Queen | Camel
Rook | Horse
Bishop | Dog
Knight | Cat
Pawn | Rabbit
Now you can place your pieces on the board and start playing.

Arimaa was the brain child of Omar Syed, a Indian born American, who created this game in the inspiration of 1997 battle between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue. (A historic battle of Man and Machine). Syed designed this game since it was user friendly to play (more easy than chess) and very tough for machine to device calculations with that of the human being. Hence in the year 2002 he announced a $10,000 price annually available for an individual or an organization that creates a machine which can beat a human Amiraa player.

Arimaa.com has nice resource for learning and playing.

Arimaa Tutorial Lesson1 | Lesson 2

Sample games to look at!