Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I see this topic has been discussed before, so I'm cathing up, see you soon!

Bigger is in general not better, in terms of the potential to catch on. Games tend to take longer, and people are impatient. Chu Shogi was a game as good as Chess variants without drops can get, and dominated Japan for many centuries. But with 46 pieces each games just last too long by modern standards, and almost no one plays it anymore. Which is a pity.

Shogi seems to have much more potetial to catch on than Omega Chess, Grand Chess or extensions of those. It really deals with the draw problem. I would rate Elven Chess above Grand Chess anyway, because I am biased, of course, but also because you can easily play it with equipment that is already around. I think a rule to prolong the presence of the strongest piece is favorable in large games, as it speeds up their completion.

Last month I happened to participate in a Superchess tournament where the 'Fool' (called 'Joker' there) did participate, and the concensus of the participants seemed to be that it was a cumbersome piece, difficult to handle and of very limited capability, and easily lost. They did not really applaud its usage.

I, too play shogi on ocasions and I believe to be very interesting. I'm not quite sure what you meant by prolonging the strong pieces in relation with what I wrote.

I also believe that making the games a bit longer comes naturally. Games should become bigger and longer in order to increase complexity.

Games with a large number of pieces tend to reach a phase where all the powerful pieces are traded, so that armies of a large number of weak pieces are left. It then takes a long time for the weak pieces to annihilate each other, so that the game can finally be decided.

Chu Shogi (and Elven Chess) have a rule against trading the Lion (the dominant piece) in a straightforward way, with as a result that the Lions survive deep into the end-game, and are in generalable to clear away most weak pieces there.

Fwiw, some world championship level players finally lost at Arimaa to a computer in a challenge match during 2015, as noted previously on CVP, i.e. that game has fallen, too.

Perhaps there can be no board game of skill worth playing that will forever not fall to computers. The progress of self-teaching algorithms & quantum computer development give me that sense, anyway. Finding enough memory for storing nodes during searches, to search deep enough for board games requiring such, might be the thing that's slowest to come as the years begin to go by, but I'm speculating, especially as a layman. The best hope for human board game players might even be if arguably less desirable technologies are somehow forgotten due to general divine intervention to, say, avert WWIII, but this is even wilder speculation. Fergus has suggested Knightmare Chess, which uses cards, might be computer resistant, but without playing I am less sure that this might not be so.

I recently reassured myself chess is still worth playing, in spite of especially computers. For example, they allow easier cheating, especially on the internet. However, chess is in good company, as technology has made cheating easier in other areas of life, such as in the field of education, and efforts are made to combat it. If chess is ever to be abandoned as dominant, the selection of a replacement game may depend on the reason why chess was abandoned. If it's due to opening theory being played out, only, then Chess960 would be a quite suitable replacement. Kasparov has suggested the same starting position be used for 10 years, then switched. I'd go farther and suggest 100+ years - it's taken that long for chess theory to be fleshed out as much as it has been to date. The reason I like a fixed start position is to help study & merchandising (opening books), which I think may have been a more positive than negative thing, say in the case of popularizing chess.

BTW, what I said below about the 'Fool' applied to the version that only mimics the move of the last-played non-Fool. It did not have any paralyszing effects. We also played Superchess with pieces that did that. The total immobilizer (called 'Mage' there) is perceived as too powerful, but a piece that only inhibits capture of its enemy neighbors, and is not too mobile and does not capture by itsef (the 'Femme Fatale') was appreciated a lot. But such 'third party interaction' is quite non-Chesslike.

H.G.

I understand now what you are saying, but rules banning captures are akward. Are you suggesting adding such a rule to grand chess or omega chess (or my variations of them)? Minor pieces have also their atractiveness through chassing away pieces more easily and controlling the center from close range or at least a specific place. I think grand chess has enough major pieces and would benefit from adding weaker ones I guess. I understand you disagree on this specific matter.

Kevin,

I don't understand FWIW, but I wached live arimaa players losing to David Wu's bot. I think chess is dieing because of beeing close to beeing strongly solved. If new games are strongly solved so be it. But it will take time. In an older post H.G. Muller stated the games like Omega chess Grand chess(he did not actually used those examples but the point stays) will quickly become strongly solved. Maybe. And this is an issue. But we have to also take in consideration that an 18x18 chess game (GO is 19x19 but has much simpler rules) is impossible for humans.

I've said I have 2 purposes the second beeing creating a huge rich game for computers only. It is 18x18. Computers have no trouble playing for 1 week but humans do. Enough on that particular matter for now.

I would be curious if anyone could judge the ability of my enhancement for Omega, Grand and Betza chess variants (well adding a foul to betza chess it's not much of an enhancement), are apropriate for the next evolution of chess, meaning something accepted by FIDE or an equivalent organism in size, an going mainstream. I'm going for the scenario where chess gets strongly solved and they go for something else.

I think eventually board games will become an affair of the bots (until we become robot computers anyway- then who knows) because humans will never catch up, so maybe my endevour (and yours of course) of finding apropriate next evolutions of chess is pointles anyway, but I like to entertain the idea. What do you think on that matter?

The way that Grand Chess tries to ensure survival of super-pieces into the end-game is by starting with three of them rather than just one (as in orthodox Chess). This makes an anti-trading rule less compelling. But I agree with you on the importance of minor pieces. You need material that you can sacrifice without being immediately lost if it doesn't lead to checkmate.

But by adding a lot of minor-class pieces to Grand Chess you would again run the risk that you run out of super-pieces to combat them at a too early stage to keep the game interesting. An alternative solution would be make these pieces promotable. So that when the board population thins and the forces have dwindled to the point where they no longer can prevent penetration of minors, super-pieces would return in the game by promotion.

I don't think anti-trading rules are a bad thing. I think it would be very interesting to play orthodox Chess with an anti-trading rule on the Queen (i.e. after Q x Q the capturing Q is absolutely royal for one move (i.e. pseudo-legal capture of it wins the game), and after other x Q the opposing Q is iron for one move (i.e. cannot be captured)).

As long as we're talking about evolution, it should be understood that this happens slowly through natural selection. At the time when Chess was evolving into Modern Chess, communities were more isolated from each other, and there was no organization codifying the rules for an international community. So, local variations sprung up here and there, and as communities with different local rules came into contact, some rules got favored over others, and eventually there was enough international agreement on which rules to use, and FIDE was created to establish and promote the same rules throughout the world.

In the present, FIDE Chess is dominant, and it has a huge international infrastructure behind it. For another variant to displace it in this present environment would be very difficult. If something like a nuclear war or the Carrington event knocked back civilization, then that might create the opportunity for a new variant to overtake FIDE Chess in popularity. Short of that, the best chance any variant has of overtaking Chess is to build up popularity through tournaments and literature.

Now, in recent times, new things have sometimes been known to overshadow old things in popularity. This is mainly due to emerging new technologies. For example, CDs made records much less popular, and then streaming made CDs less popular. With games, video games have become very popular, and newer video games continue to become more popular than older ones, because they feature better graphics and use better technology. If video games erode the popularity of Chess, and the Chess world becomes more like the video game world with players interested in a variety of games instead of just one, then other variants might have a chance of displacing Chess. One step in this direction is to move the typical place for playing Chess from face-to-face across an actual board to over the internet, and a second step is to make other variants available over the internet on the same sites where Chess is played. What would be really helpful would be to have websites where people can easily tinker with Chess and play their own variants against a computer. This would help lead people from thinking about Chess as a single game with fixed rules to thinking of it as a certain type of game with a variety of possibiltiies to try out.

Given such an environment, I suspect that the games that would do best against Chess are ones that do not veer away from Chess too much. Those that introduce a couple new pieces that fit with the other pieces, such as Omega Chess, Grand Chess, or Eurasian Chess would probably have a better chance than others. There's also a chance that Chess could go in the direction of Blernsball (the future version of Baseball in Futurama), where something like Knightmare Chess, which combines the appeal of card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh with Chess, would do well. In fact, if card games like these overtake Chess in popularity, something like Knightmare Chess could serve as a gateway to the world of Chess and its variants.

In any case it is important to remember that Chess (or its alternatives) are not a top-down effort. People will not play games because organizations endorse those. They create organizations for the games they are playing.

Chess variant popularizing it's not a top down effort , but designing good variants could be. I don't think evolution, in the sense of natural evolution, will shape most of the new variants but careful consideration of strengths and weaknesess of the game. That being said natural selection has maybe a place in it!

Secondly as FIDE already exists, if say someone persuades FIDE to accept 2,3 popular variants, absurdly speaking then definetly more people would learn and enjoy them.

I think, too shogi has a better chance of expanding than Omega or Great chess and partly from the very interesting gameplay, partly because a tradition exists already.

I don't think so. Chess players don't care at all what FIDE says. They play what they want,which is orthodox Chess, and see anything else as a threat to their investment in learning to play it well. As FIDE itself is run by people like that, it is more likely they would ban anyone that doesn't play by orthodox rules. In fact I think they are already doing that; my brother, who is involved in running a Chess club, told me that one of the conditions for a club to be a member of the national Chess association is that they will not allow games under deviating rules.

If the FIDE and Nippon Shogi Renmei would decide to merge, Chess players would simply shrug and think: "this does not concern me".

Secondly as FIDE already exists, if say someone persuades FIDE to accept 2,3 popular variants, absurdly speaking then definetly more people would learn and enjoy them.

I think, too shogi has a better chance of expanding than Omega or Great chess and partly from the very interesting gameplay, partly because a tradition exists already.

Fergus,

I was thinking...

In the interest of natural evolution, do you think I should contact the inventors of said 3 variants, because I owe a great deal of inspiration from them and ask If I can publish my variants as fully fleged ones, so when it comes to that website that you were talking about, the variations on the otherwise very good variants would stand a chance on they're own. What I have actually done is take two good variants and combine what I considered their strengths into 2 new better, in my view, variations.

Personally, I have never asked permission from inventors of variants I've borrowed from. I didn't ask Christian Freeling if I could use the name Grand Cavalier Chess, and I didn't ask Daniel MacDonald for permission to use the Wizard and Champion in my games. If it's how you prefer to operate, you can go ahead and ask people for permission. What I consider the important thing is that you are confident in the quality of your games and consider them worth publishing.

FWIW (= For What It's Worth), there is some minimal interest from at least some national chess organizations in at least a handful of chess variants, especially bughouse. The USCF runs a bughouse event for children annually, I've seen on the internet (the USCF set up a committee to look at chess variants some years ago, too). If I recall correctly, FIDE includes at least the rules of Fischer Random (also called Chess960) on its website, for anyone interested in organizing or playing such - though I don't think FIDE supports such people otherwise, at the moment. An observation: my Ottawa club holds at least one unrated/fun Fischer Random tournament a year, all in one night. A couple of us hope for Seirawan Chess night(s) too, but additional equipment (hawk & elephant pieces) is needed for that (or, the ugly solution of wrapping elastics around 4 extra pieces might be used). The use of, say, 10x10 boards is out of the question for an established club that's already invested in all 8x8 boards.

A problem for the Canadian chess federation (CFC) is that they've never had much in the way of resources (perhaps typical of many national chess federations), and so funds & efforts are reserved just for chess. Nevertheless, a bughouse event for children is now held often each year at the Canadian Youth Chess Championship, though it's not official CFC policy to do so, unlike for the USCF. Organizers sometimes totally independent of organized chess are already holding several bughouse events across Canada each year, sometimes with cash prizes.

Besides bughouse, the other chess variant that seems most popular at the moment, especially on the internet, would be crazyhouse. It is like Shogi, and since it would otherwise need extra pieces or special tiles to play over-the-board (which many people do), the internet is especially useful for playing crazyhouse.

In a seperate thread on CVP I gave a link to statistics for Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) circa 2015, and for more than 15 years a steady average of about 2% of all games played were for the multiple chess variants offered (the rest [98%] were chess games), with over half of these being bughouse games played, and, for much of the remainder, crazyhouse was played. That might be an indication of the largely global trend at the moment for the relative popularity of various chess variants, and an indication of the percentage of chessplayers who may also play chess variants (i.e. 2%). There are 605,000,000 adult chess players globally, FIDE estimates (including casual players), so that works out to my estimate of 12,100,000 adult chess variant players globally (including casual ones), if one is to be consistent with FICS stats.

Also fwiw, anyone who like me has played chess seriously and kept track of the cost of their chess tournament entry fees (not to mention chess books & equipment, plus any travel, lodgings & dining out costs) vs. what they win back in prize money over any number of years will eventually see that tournament chess is a losing investment cash-wise for the vast majority of tournament players, including those who reach master level (like I did). Still, people play lotteries all the time in spite of the odds, though from customer comments I've heard when near lottery vendors, many seem unaware it's a losing investment; at least lotteries normally have more respectable prize funds and cheaper fees than for chess tournaments, though. Chess players might take playing just chess by itself less seriously if they considered all that at some point, or did so more often.

I edited (added to) the first & last paragraphs of my previous post, in case anyone missed it.

Fergus,

I am concern about the quality of the games, that is why I asked for advice from knoledgeble people. So any comments on the actual games? Or anyone else for that matter. Comments on the quality of my games are highly apreciated, as I am rather new.

Kevin,

We live in the age of the internet, so playing online overcomes many of the problems related to not having enough material. I never played chess professionally but if i had the resources (I don't) I'd gladly organize chess variants events.

I think I was not clear on a matter of outmost importance. The point of this small discussion I launched was to find objectively good variants to play, for that contributions to the same game by many variantists are welcomed, so tell me: Aurelian you did that good, that wrong., H.G. started it a little bit. I'm going to do a little self criticism too. A treaper (3,3) enhancement to the knight (the fact that is just move has no bearing here) could be a little be to long to be effective (espeacially in the opening) on a 10x10 board.