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One other quick comment I forgot to add to my previous remarks: How exactly to you determine who is a 'veteran' ? You shouldn't necessarily only go by how many times someone has entered previous contests. I've entered a few (41 squares, 42 squares, 100 squares), but I have several other CVs published on this site. Someone who has never entered a contest on this site before may actually have had a few other games published here, so they don't necessarily qualify as a newcomer, do they?? I therefore think that the best criteria in judging the 'newcomer vs. veteran' arguement is to look at the total number of CVs they have had published on this site (including their entry or entries for this contest) and rank them from most to least, and make the deliniation somewhere in the middle, or in quarters. Top quarter most experienced evaluates bottom quarter least experienced, second quarter most experienced evaluates second quarter least experienced, and vice versa. The problem is that you can't have it both ways. You can't break the contest down along those 'newcomer vs. veteran' lines AND break them down into the subsets I was suggesting earlier, in which certain types of game designs are equally distributed into different starting groups. The best you can do is start out with my suggestions, dividing all the 12 by 7s, 7 by 12s, and 10 by 10 -16s, and the 4 Newton submissions, and from there, rank the remaining games and randomly distribute them. <p> The problem is that after a while we start making this more complicated than it really needs to be. Here, I've just come up with a proposed breakdown of the 32 published games so far into 4 groups of 8 games each. What my groupings below accomplish is to make sure that all games are equally divided according to the parameters I suggested in my previous comments. That is to say, I've successfully managed in the groupings below to equally seperate all 4 '7 file 12 rank' games, all 4 '10 by 10 -16' games, all 3 '12 file 7 rank' games, distribute one Newton family submission into each of the 4 groups, and make sure that no group contains two entries by the same person. I've also divided the 3 most complicated games (as per my earlier suggestion) into different groups. Those can be found in groups #s 1, 2, and 3, and so therefore I suggest that the 33rd and final (and as yet unpublished) entry into the contest go into group # 4 below, which would be the largest and yet be one without any of the other 3 most complicated games, thus somewhat offsetting the imbalance. After breaking the games into different groups according to the criteria above, I then sorted the remaining games simply according to the order in which they were first published (earliest into one, next earliest into the next, next earliest into the next) and so on. The results of my efforts (and mind you are all free to come up with your own groupings, this is just my suggestion): <p>GROUP # 1: Invasion, Herb Garden Chess, Delegating Chess, Arabian Chess, Ramayana Chess, Ultra Slanted Escalator Chess, Tandem 84, Excelsior <p>GROUP # 2: The Pit, Schizophrenic Chess, Ryu Shogi, Transporter Chess, Unconventional Warfare Chess, Lions and Dragons Chess, Round Table Chess 84, Cross Eyed Chess <p>GROUP # 3: Tree Garden Chess, Quintessential Chess, Wizard Chess, Tetrahedal Chess, Jacks and Witches 84, Beastmaster Chess, Influence Chess, Tamerspiel <p>GROUP # 4: Seenschach, Viking Chess, Orwell Chess, Outback Chess, Chessma 84, Heros Hexagonal Chess, Battle Cheiftain Chess, Wizard's War <p> You're all welcome to tinker with the above list here or there if you come up with some subtle criteria I have overlooked, but I think I've done most of the work for you right here, I can't see too many ways on improving on this. To me, any further alterations to the above will be 'six of one, half dozen of the other' that is to say, not have much practical differences from my suggestion. Please note that there were only 8 games which did not fall into any of my previously suggested categories (board size, contributors) which needed to be specifically seperated, and those were: Tandem84, Round Table Chess 84, Battle Cheiftan Chess, Influence Chess, Wizard's War, Excelsior, Cross Eyed Chess, and Tamerspiel, and of those I just listed, the last 3 do not currently have ZRF files available for them. I have distributed them into groups 1, 2, and 3, so once again the 33rd and final entry which I will also assume does not as of yet have a ZRF ready for it should go into Group # 4, thus balancing out that disparity as well. (Please note that I did not take into account the 'newcomer vs. veteran' criteria when I made the above groupings, but as I have just pointed out, only Tandem84, Round Table Chess 84, Battle Cheiftan Chess, Influence Chess, and Wizard's War have any flexibility to be moved around. The other 27 games, I would think, need to be locked into place, otherwise you start conflicting with the seperation criterias we have spoken of before.)