Enter Your Reply

Can I explain another reason why having commercially available variant
pieces would help here?  Most game purchases are done as gifts, either for
birthday or Christmas.  In order to facilitate the growth of variants, it
is going to be important to allow people to buy the equipment to give
other people as a gift.  This also would allow the variant community to
give someone variant pieces as a gift.  Like, let's say you do have a
variant, and you know people happened to like a design of yours.  If you
have pieces and equipment available for sale, you could buy it for them as
a gift.

Without this, what happens with variants is people find it a one-time
novel experience.  A one-time novel experience doesn't grow interest in
variants.

On this note, would people here be willing to buy chess variant pieces for other people, to give as gifts?  Shoot, you could even do some custom jobs where you get to name the piece after a person, give it some wacky power that is customized, and particular, as a gag gift.

Like the 'Steve' piece.  It has the power to move like a Knight (because it has noble intentions) but has the power to freeze other pieces next to it, through the power of 'smalltalk' preventing them from moving.  So, these would be gag gift pieces you can give people.  I am sure there is a Steve out there somewhere (I don't have anyone in mind by refering it).

So, when people play a customized variant chess, they can use their own custom piece instead of the queen, or replacing the king if doing extinction.