Enter Your Reply

Fergus, I do appreciate what you are saying as each game being a standalone
game with its own flavor, and arguably each one being a 'work of art' in
its own right.  My concern about this is that it makes each game a deadend
that can't be picked up and tweaked the way Chess has to spawn variants. 
The community doesn't end up owning the game and collectively tweaking it
to its wishes.  It is a take it or leave it, which ends up resulting in a
bunch of games that have their own followings, but not enough to reach a
critical mass to support mass adoption.  There is also egos at stake where
one designer or another jockeys for position to have their game as 'the
next chess'.  I have dealt with such individuals on the commercial level,
who have staked their financial lives on it, and it isn't pretty.  I could
name multiple of them, and then ask if any of their games have a following
here.  I don't see it.  I believe in an earlier NextChess discussion, we
saw limitations on a select game being picked.

So, let me amend what I said by saying we should have room for preferred
configurations, and also games as stand alone, but I also believe we should
have some form (or several forms) that allow the community to give feedback
and we evolve a design we can get enough people to play that has a critical
mass behind it that it could get adopted and we get some neat byproducts of
this, like commercial equipment being made to be able to play (you finally
get variant pieces... YIPPIE).

In a nutshell, can we have both what you want (each game as a work of art
unto itself) and also something we can evolve as a community, that can
borrow from all over?  Maybe have a third way also of an Athlon format
where, over a given year, a set number of the established games are the
pool that is played, and we push for a championship over that format. 

Let's do everything I say, rather than either or.