Enter Your Reply The Comment You're Replying To George Duke wrote on Mon, Dec 21, 2009 11:18 AM EST:Happy Solstice. Score: Mastodon > Unicorn Great > Big Board > Centennial > Eurasian > Black Ghost > Eight-Stone > Templar > Modern > Courier de la Dama > Switching > Seirawan. Responsive to discussion, Big Board like all of them is inclusive of its variants broadly interpreted, each one easily 100s of variants keeping its core intact. Also, correction: to any picayune, Modern and Courier de la Dama are reversed per original intent. The Stones are not Mutator so much as extraneous elements or maybe what Gilman was just investigating ''non-pieces'' or quasi-pieces. http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/contest/eightstones.html http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=24303 Representative Eight-Stone poses: what can be done in Next Chess medium by way of externalities? Lavieri's Promoter; Betza's Black Ghost -- that we did just call a mutator; Thompson's Trampoline; Aikin's Stones. Eight-Stone is the chosen example of thorough monkey-wrenching, spanners in the works. Actually though as much a novelty CV as Rococo, the Eight-stone would excel whenas systematizing Track Two CVs, as one of just a few present nominees really belonging on that interface Track One/Track Two. The Stones block, period, and never disappear, as players move them and move pieces. Playground tactics. Why not? Did Aikin test them on still larger boards? If Stones were to number one only, is not that approximately the Black Ghost of 1997 uncaught and uncapturable instead? Stones are like multiple Ghosts of indifferent colour. Like the Shirley MacLaine-Sellers oldie, Stones and Black Ghost tell of ''Being There,'' or having been, as in ''been there done that.'' The way to place Eight-Stone is ask, how much more research is warranted? For NextChess, hard-to-classify Eight-Stone belongs right there with Black Ghost, Betza's taking priority in the decremental ladder of imperfection. ''In 1772 a committee, of which Lavoisier was member, was appointed by the French Academy, to investigate a report that a stone had fallen from the sky at Luce, France. The falling of large stones from the sky, without any assignable cause of their previous ascent...'' --Fort, 'Book of the Damned' 1919 Edit Form You may not post a new comment, because ItemID NextChess7 does not match any item.