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Comments by Jeremy Good
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I'm in.
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Charles, I have created a couple of variants that use carriages and zemels and I hope to create many more variants using many more of the pieces you have named. I have also given names myself to a whole new class of pieces inspired by Knappen's Quinquereme (Pentere) and Leeloo. I would like to share them with you directly, so please email me so that I can email you back (since your email address doesn't appear with your user name).
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The rules for castling aren't stated exactly either here or in the rules for Janus Chess. How far towards the rook is the king supposed to go?
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Why do not the logs show up? I could swear I said 'Public' for this.
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![A contest or tournament](/index/contest.gif)
Congratulations, Gary. A great inventor of great chess variants wins. Great!
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Warp Point Chess turns out to have a very similar feel to it as Knight Relay Chess. They both contain uncapturable / uncapturing knights that weirdly impact other pieces. The gameplay suffers, in both cases, from leaving the rest of the board sparser by exempting two live pieces to work with. An expanded board with more varying types of uncapturable, weirdly impacting pieces would benefit the gameplay of both types of games. However, these games are good ways of familiarizing oneself with warp points and relay knights.
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I want to suggest that an extra rating be added. In between 'Poor' and 'Good' the rating of 'Average.' There are cases when I think a variant is 'Average' but it would be too harsh for me to say 'Poor' too caring to say 'Good.'
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Ah, yes. Okay, it was my fault for the confusion. Thank you.
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Thinking about this gave me the giggles: -6 Beneath Contempt -5 Contemptible -4 Loathsome -3 Hideous -2 Miserable -1 Awful 0 Bad 1 Neutral / Average 2 Fair 3 Good 4 Excellent 5 Awesome 6 Incomparably Fine If one wanted to have additional layers, we could initiate additional categories, such as for 'originality.' A lot of games are original but have bad gameplay or unoriginal but with good gameplay (I am reminded of Ben Good's essay here about Omega Chess). Still other categories for 'fun-ness,' presentation, appearance. Categories could be optionally listed according to ratings and categories with overall negative ratings should perhaps be shelved into different sections of chess variants after each receives a fair number of votes from the community of users (as opposed to just members). There is one thing that disturbs me most of all about how people rate games and I fear that there is sometimes a tendency to judge games without playing them, trying them out. Sometimes, it is not necessary to playtest a game, but I think too often a game is judged too much by certain superficial aspects that have little to do with worth of gameplay (as with books by their covers.) If one has a separate category strictly for rating 'gameplay' (as opposed to other aspects), it could be a category that could only be filled out after actually playing the game. If nobody is willing to play a game, that would usually imply something about the nature of the game. I suggest that as long as a game maintains a positive gameplay rating, it not be shelved to the negative ratings section. Because a game can fail every other mechanism or gradation of analysis, but if people enjoy playing it, that's probably a pretty good test, in my opinion. 'Confusing presentation, ugly appearance, highly unoriginal concept, but amusing gameplay.'
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Both schemingmind.com and brainking.com have a number of 'hidden information' games with rules that are automatically enforced. You can try both sites out for free. They also both have a lot of mini-tournaments (that members can begin) for their variants, though neither has anything near the number of variants Game Courier has. One thing I like a lot about schemingmind.com and would like to see replicated at chessvariants.org is a pyramid system for each variant. You can join a pyramid and then challenge other people at your level. If you win, you go to a higher level and if you lose, you go down a level (or if you're at the bottom, you stay at the bottom).
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I meant members as opposed to users, but probably there shouldn't be any restrictions on how a rating gets generated. I just meant mechanisms so that the value of a game isn't artificially inflated or deflated... By 'shelve' I just want to reinforce that I don't mean, be made unavailable, but just put in a separate section, and just as an optional way of listing according to rating.
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I'm glad my tongue-in-cheek proposed worded descriptions amused some people as they did me. While I agree that using words like 'beneath contempt' to describe a variant may hurt people's feelings, I do think there is a serious reason to use a number system that includes 1 through 10. I do not think that 1 through 5 allows as much flexibility in analysis. A '4' in a 1 - 10 system is less harsh than 'Poor' in a 1 - 5 system. I think there is a serious purpose in having a rating system which allows a certain depth of analysis. That is so we can list pages according to their rating. This will allow visitors to the site, including ourselves, to sort through variants according to apparent quality. Of course, popularity will not always translate into quality, but at least we can have some sorting mechanisms in place that will help guide us through an increasingly prolific site. I would like to see all 10s rated together, all 9.4's rated together, all 5.32's rated together, etc (averages derived from cumulative ratings). This would encourage people to really take seriously the art of critiquing games. Does a game really deserve the rating of 10? People can go to the page on which 10s are listed and say one way or the other, thus influencing the way in which the games are listed. I would also like to ask that we take seriously the idea of separate rating systems for different aspects of games 'playability' 'originality' and 'appearance.' Again, the advantage is to evolve sorting mechanisms (sorting according to playability, etc). It would also help the designer to know what people did or didn't like about the games. I would also like to hear some feedback for a separate rating system in place for Game Courier post-game analysis, so that people who have actually played games can then have a chance to rate them. At the end of a game, there could be an option, 'Do you want to rate this variant?'
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In Charles Gilman's Ecumenical Chess, the camel-bishop compound is called a Caliph. In Mark Hedden's Ganymede Chess, the camel-bishop compound is called a Flying Dragon.
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Okay, I guess there is no feature that allows records of logs for Leandro's Chess. I would like there to be. Just want to say that.
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Why does this game seem to be getting assigned as a school project again and again?
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Whoops? I thought it might have been the quotes too so I went back and tried to re-do it without quotes.
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Does it make any sense to have no castling in this variant? Castling doesn't just serve the purpose of getting the rooks out of the corners. It helps get the King out of the center of the board.
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When I click on the button for the new 'Dervish Chess' preset, all I get is an empty board.
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Best not to play this variant then, Christine, or Bond James Bond may wish to have a word with you. http://www.chessvariants.com/diffmove.dir/oomost-chess.html
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Just fyi, I did contact the inventor and he agreed to change the name of this variant to Amazon Grand. We have written to some editors and asked them to take action to this effect.
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