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OK, I think many people look at variants with different goals in mind. Some people have dreams and fantasies of becoming multimillionaires from inventing a variant; this is a ridiculous fantasy. A chess variant inventor has less change of making money from their variant than a conlang creator has of making money from their language.

Other people enjoy inventing new pieces and making a variant based on those pieces. Betza enjoyed this; he also enjoyed finding a mix of pieces just as strong as the FIDE pieces so one could have balanced games with different Chess armies. Other people enjoy combining themes of various variants to create something using a new theme.

For me, I like a variant where we quickly get out of the opening book and in to the 'street fighting' of trying to do tactics better than your opponent. I also like opening analysis of a variant, for the sake of opening analysis (not that said analysis is useful; then again opening analysis was not really useful in FIDE chess until the 20th century).

This is why I like Capa/Grand Chess variants; with two more pieces almost as powerful as the queen on the board, the games get very tactical very quick. Just like 'mad queen' chess before people discovered boring defenses like the Sicilian defense.

And, there are a lot of Capa opening setups one can choose from making it so there is never a chance of the opening getting stale. But that doesn't stop me from having done some opening analysis of my particular Capa openeing setup.

So, I generally don't invent variants because I find more joy in playing and studying variants already invented, and because there are already a lot of possibilities, even with the modest Capa variants.

- Sam