Comments by FergusDuniho

'I would think that it would be the CVP's duty to include in-depth
coverage.'

The CVP is not a person and has no duties. Nor do those of us who maintain
this site have any duty to provide any coverage of this game. My objection
is to the notion of duty. We may have an interest in covering it. It might
be desirable to cover it. We may even have an editor who will be willing
and able to cover it. But it is not our duty to cover it.

Oh, and Jared, I hope you don't have any contrary opinions of your own.
Otherwise, I may have to authoritatively oppress them out of you.

Yes, Black has checkmated White in your game. 

Game Courier cannot detect mate. Adding this ability would greatly
increase the overhead of the program, because it would have to consider
all possible moves, and it would have to check the legality of each one.
What Game Courier does do is check whether the single move someone tries
to make is legal. Once a player is checkmated, he will find that any and
every move he tries to make will be illegal.

When you checkmated your opponent, you should have changed the status of
your game from 'Ongoing' to 'Steve Jones has won.' Since you didn't,
I have now done it for you.

If Magic the Gathering could catch on, maybe this game has a chance. But
I'm going to remain skeptical until I see it catch on. Magic has some
marketing advantages in its favor. First of all, Magic the Gathering is a
really cool and meaningful name, whereas Navia Dratp is an ugly,
meaningless name. Now maybe it will catch on despite that. Yu-gi-oh! is a
stupid name, yet it has enjoyed some popularity. The other problem I see
with this game catching on is that collectible pieces are going to cost
much more than collectible cards. But, since I collected Star Wars action
figures as a kid, maybe that won't be that big a hurdle. However, I think
a Saturday morning cartoon show is what this game will need to really catch
on in popularity.

The piece shown in the photo is pretty, but it also looks like something
most little boys wouldn't be caught dead with. Little boys normally
prefer something more masculine than a cute little fairy. Including scary
monsters would probably make the game more appealing to that demographic.
And, considering that Chess variants seem much more popular among males
than females, for nearly everyone at this site is male, it's going to be
important to reach a male audience with this game.

As for pieces such as these vs. more abstract pieces, I am a strong
supporter of abstraction in piece design. For me, one of the things that
helps make a game more playable is being able to tell the difference
between different pieces at a glance. I can easily do this with a Staunton
set, with my own Abstract set, and with some of the more abstract sets
I've found in Chess programs (such as Futura in Checkmate! or Art Deco in
Chessmaster 6000). But when I've played Chess with humaniform figurine
pieces, or 3D images of such in a computerized Chess game, it has been
easier for me to confuse pieces.

Matt,

You might want to consider getting a userid that will allow you to post
here without waiting for an editor to okay your messages. It's free, and
it will also give you the ability to edit your messages after posting
them.

I think Larry was complaining about a marketing ploy for getting people to
buy more than they need. It's commonly done with cards. You buy a packet
of trading cards without knowing what's in it and hope you get some new
ones. But it seems less likely to me that this would be done with
figurines. I imagine that Navia Dratp will include some starter sets and
booster sets, but I doubt that they will be selling their figurines in
mystery grab bags. With the higher prices of figurines, I expect that
would be a bad marketing ploy. It seems more likely to me that most
figurines will be sold individually like action figures.

As for myself, I don't expect to buy the game at all. This is partly
because I'm poor, and this game is just an extravagant luxury item to me.
Also, I have never been into collectible games, perhaps because they were
never a fad when I was a kid. The first collectible game I ever heard of
was Magic the Gathering, and I never heard of it until I was in graduate
school. And I've still never played it. The only collectible game I ever
played was Pokemon, which I played once with a much younger cousin who was
into the game. I somehow won without really understanding the rules, and I
know I won only because that's what my cousin told me. When I was in high
school, the really big thing in gaming was Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I
remember remarking once that I had spent around $200.00 on this game. It
was like a collectible game in that you would buy it in components, but it
wasn't the same thing. I would describe it as a modular game, not a
collectible game. The main things to buy for the game were rulebooks,
modules, and dice. You could buy figurines for it too, but I never did. I
was still in high school the last time I played AD&D, and I eventually
sold most of my books. Since then, I have never played another role
playing game.

I do hold out some hope that Navia Dratp will draw some people into Chess
variants. It sometimes takes only a little push to move someone in this
direction. My early interest in Chess variants had lain dormant for many
years. In 1998, I downloaded an abandonware copy of Battle Chess II for
the Amiga, and I ran it on an Amiga emulator on my PC. This turned out to
be Chinese Chess, which got me interested in the possibility of finding
programs that would play other Chess variants. I then found programs for
Shogi, Grand Chess, and Capablanca's Chess. A short time later I
discovered this site, and shortly after that, Zillions debuted, and the
rest is history. It's possible that Navia Dratp will directly inspire an
interest in Chess variants in only a few people, but even if that's all
that happens, it could have a rippling effect if even just one of them
becomes a regular member of the CV community. So there is potential that
Navia Drapt will help the CV cause even if I'm not going to buy the game
myself.

It isn't automatically a draw, but it is a situation where it may be
reasonable for both players to agree to a draw.

I've discovered a new way for us to get the word out about Chess variants.
I recently changed my web browser from Mozilla to Mozilla Firefox, and I
added various extensions to my new browser. One of these is the
StumbleUpon extension, which provides a new way for surfing the web. By
giving information on your interests and by rating web pages with a couple
buttons in the StumbleUpon toolbar, you provide information for StumbleUpon
to intelligently pick other websites you might like. This is based on what
other people with similar interests and preferences have rated positively
in the past. Whenever you click the Stumble! button on the toolbar, it
takes you to a new website. Anyway, this technology can be used by us to
recommend particular pages on Chess variants, perhaps our favorite
variants, to users of StumbleUpon who have indicated an interest in
Chess.

StumbleUpon also provides each of its users with a blog, which is
especially geared toward writing reviews of websites. Besides being able
to read what someone writes by visiting that person's blog, you can use
the toolbar to read reviews that other users have written of the page
you're visiting.

StumbleUpon users also benefit from there being other users with similar
interests. The benefit is that StumbleUpon will become better at finding
sites they would like. So I would benefit from getting others who are
interested in Chess variants to use the service.

The StumbleUpon service is free, and it can be used not only with Firefox
but with Mozilla, Netscape, and Internet Explorer. You can find it here:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

My own StumbleUpon blog is http://cavalier.stumbleupon.com/

James Spratt complained about the Majon award on another page. Until just
now, you couldn't add comments to this page, because it wasn't in the
database. So I just added it to the database before adding my comment
here.

Majon offers two awards. One of these awards can be given by anyone to
anyone. In fact, I could award it to my own site. It's basically a
pseudo-award anyone can pin on his site when it hasn't actually been
recognized by others. This so-called award is identified in some of the
graphics for it as the 'Web Select Award'. That's what the Majon award
on this page is called. The other award is called 'Majon's Most
Prestigious Award'. We apparently don't have that one. It is the one
they give out with some degree of discrimination. I did not see a single
link to any site that had won either award. I suppose no one is stupid
enough to pay mega-bucks for a link on this marketing website.

Those of you who have paid attention to what I have previously said were my
personality types may remember that I believed my Myers-Briggs type was
INTP and my Enneagram type was 5w4. I have now reevaluated both of these.
I now believe that I am an ISTJ and a 1w9.

One might look at all the games I've created and wonder how I could be a
Sensing type, which is what the S in ISTJ stands for. After all, aren't
iNtuitives the creative ones? On this matter, I think it helps to compare
my style of game design with Ralph Betza's. I believe it reveals a clear
S/N difference. Ralph designs games in broad strokes. He frequently
describes general ideas for games, leaving the option of playing the game
one way or another, and some of his games allow for endless variations on
a general theme. To me, this illustrates an iNtuitive way of designing
games. But I design games very differently. I focus on every detail of a
game, spelling out the rules very carefully and precisely. When I create a
game, I create one single game with clearly defined rules that cover even
the most minor of details, and when I'm done, I can usually program it
for Zillions or Game Courier.

Besides this, I pay careful attention to the graphics for the games I
create. For me, creating a game is not just an exercise in abstract
thought but an exercise in graphic design. This requires Sensing more than
it does iNtuition. In the same vein, I have designed beautiful boards and
pieces for games I haven't created, such as Shogi and Chinese Chess. If I
were an iNtuitive, I might not care about such things enough to make such
an effort, but when I play a game on a computer, the aesthetics of the
board matter to me a lot, and I play better when the graphics are
beautiful than when they are plain and unsightly.