Check out Balbo's Chess, our featured variant for October, 2024.


[ Help | Earliest Comments | Latest Comments ]
[ List All Subjects of Discussion | Create New Subject of Discussion ]
[ List Earliest Comments Only For Pages | Games | Rated Pages | Rated Games | Subjects of Discussion ]

Single Comment

Chess with Different Armies. Betza's classic variant where white and black play with different sets of pieces. (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
George Duke wrote on Thu, Jan 21, 2010 05:41 PM UTC:
I think Betza spent too much time on this. Another CV with different armies is Fantasy Grand, 10x10 instead, ranked 13 of 21 so far at Next Chess threads. Should armies be identical, or different, in the main line of Track One chesses -- as OrthoChess64's particular incomplete same-armies continue their free fall -- only being cushioned now from catastrophe by their speed chess forms of it at Chessbase and other f.i.d.e. forums? Deliberately to avoid Betza, Fantasy Grand is chosen from the genre. Now Berolina most would consider not much more than a Mutator, yet there is truth to the idea that the modern western Pawn, not the Queen, has been the essence of the successful salvaging of mediaeval Shatranj for so many more centuries on little same-old sixty-four squares. Actually, Betza did not start advocating strongly CDA for Next Chess until the very 3.June.2002 comment under question. His remark can probably be interpreted as prompted by lots of new CVPage material overwhelming his mostly Track Two body of work, new CVs by others that individually were obviously promising for Next Chesses. For example, Centennial's attention-grabbing opening line of being the ''holy grail.'' ''Elephantiasis correction'' may have to operate dissimilarly within different-armies CVs because of relative unknowns and necessary approximations. Could opposing sides even benefit by having their own scale of piece-values to some extent, for interims when minimally recognizable patterns are becoming established? The reasons piece-values' evaluations inevitably can become somewhat personalized in the field of CVs: (1) greater/lesser differential familiarity and skill with certain exotic pieces; (2) preference to direct forces to one or another alternate plural win condition; (3) promotion prospects' upending degrees of usefulness in exact point-values; (4) inherent fluctuation in many piece-type's value deriving from how many moves yet played. Whose scales of values optimize (within 0.1 or 1.0 even), and types of adjustments to them for better CVs could continue remaining somewhat unsettled, or even ''trade'' secrets you would not want others to have precisely. To simplify and trade, i.e. capture, or practice trade-avoidance, different armies add the understood still more complex dimension, but at the cost of rules themselves suffering, lacking aesthetics by comparison to an unevasive Mastodon, Great Shatranj, or Sissa. Philosophically, a progression in departure from Ockham's Razor.