Single Comment

In going through the list of recognized variants, I noticed that some games
made the list for reasons of historical interest rather than because they
were popular or well-regarded. For example, the text for Tridimensional
Chess (Star Trek) says, 'The variant of three dimensional chess as it
appears in Star Trek may not deserve a recognition for its playability.
However, it is probably the most widely known variant three dimensional
variant of chess, due to its exposure in several episodes of the popular
Star Trek science fiction television series.' If the purpose of the
recognized variants list is help newcomers find games they will probably
like, it doesn't seem so useful to include mediocre games that are mainly
of historical interest. Short of editing the list myself, two solutions
come to mind. One is to create a fifth tier, which would be for games that
are mainly of historical interest. This tier might be called Noteworthy.
It might be suitable for Shatranj, Chaturanga, and Tamerlane Chess. The
other solution is to establish a procedure for weeding the list through
group consensus. It might be worthwhile to implement both solutions.

Here is a procedure I propose for weeding the list. When the members of a
tier exceed ten, hold a ranked ballot poll to completely rank the games in
the tier. One purpose for this would be to create a top ten list for the
tier, which would be displayed on this page. The other would be to
identify which game in the tier is held in lowest regard. This would be
the game that ranks at the bottom of the ranking established by the poll.
A second poll would then be held on whether to keep this game in the list.
This would be a simple 'Aye' or 'Nay' poll. If 75% or more of the
voters favored dropping the game from the list, then it would be dropped.
If there were still more than ten games in the tier, then a new poll would
be held for keeping or dropping the new lowest ranked game in the tier.
This process would repeat until the lowest ranked game had enough support
to stay or until there were only ten games left in the tier. Also, if a
game had survived this procedure the last time, or at least survived it
within the last year, and it found itself at the bottom again, it would
receive a temporary reprieve from being weeded out. The procedure would
not be used for weeding the list unless the bottom-most ranked game had
not been through this procedure the last time and had not been through it
within the past year. This is similar to Derek Nall's suggestion of
capping the list, but it allows the list to grow as long as all games in
the list are sufficiently well-regarded.

Again, comments are welcome. These are offered as suggestions, and I am
not yet saying that these are how things will be.