Single Comment

 My rather restrictive set of criteria (as developed so far!) for a Next Chess took heavily into account what I thought is the importance of simplicity of piece movement rules as a whole for the sake of a game's greater popularity, that is to attract even very young child players. Sad to say, but if someone gives up on an activity as a child, they might not come back to it with fresh eyes for many years, if ever.

Even setting that aside, the Apothecary games, while quite rich and complex, even rule-wise arguably, have the added possible handicap, in my view, of having off-board extra pieces and squares (not to mention the lack of a fixed setup position), which could well be a problem for displaying set up decorative sets, e.g. in the home, or for even use in clubs or tournament halls; the board effectively becomes 12 rows long with the extra cells, if nothing else, as far as making the size of physical pieces needing to be smaller than for a 10x10 board (remember, a lot of tables are much longer than they are wide). On a computer this is no problem though, at least if cash prize events can one day commonly be held online, which includes maximum precautions vs. possible cheating, easier face-to-face at a physical playing site.

I'm assuming somehow hopefully we're never going to be cyborgs en mass, and so will generally continue to want to meet at clubs or tournament halls, but I suppose if humans becoming cyborgs (perhaps us being 100% machine is the ultimate goal here?!) somehow is not impossible, nor a hellish folly, then I assume we can all just send each other internet or some other sort of signals rather than having to ever physically meet, should we still care to play chess variants or even enjoy sharing a meal. Beware of what men (including our dear leaders) may wish for though: immortality and omniscience were promised, but not delivered, in the mythical(?) Garden of Eden by one infamous serpent. Put another way, one retired Ottawa chess organizer once wrote half-jokingly that those of us who aren't paranoid have been weeded out by natural selection.