Hi, Stephen. In our game against you, Eric and I were under the apparently
mistaken assumption that we could confer with one another. Clearly didn't
help us much but that's what we did. Now, I'm reading over these comments
and I see that we weren't supposed to, otherwise you wouldn't have the
admonition, 'never trust your partner.' Can I suggest that you allow
partners to confer with one another as part of the rules of the world
championship. This would increase game quality and allow for partners to
feel that they are truly cooperating with one another. How will the
tournament be structured? With what time parameters? 

To everyone else: 4-Way Chess is great fun and I encourage everyone to
enter this tournament, either by themselves or with a partner. Is anyone
interested in being my partner? (even though I've only played one game of
4-Way Chess and lost quickly?)

This is a great idea. We should make a piece set modelled after this!

Any volunteers? We could make a piece set for the English alphabet and a piece set for other alphabets too, such as Greek. This would give Game Courier variants a lot more to work with. Small letters as well as tall letters.

Why did ______ create this ___ if it's not even considered _________ by
_____? 

Well done, ____! ;-)

One of the best variants, certainly and Michael Nelson, I think, is also one of the best variant designers.

I would like to see an expanded (more complete) list of pieces added to the classes.

Also, maybe an extension for some of the more powerful pieces, as with tripunch pieces and cylindrical / toroidal pieces? Would be fun to have classes 9 and even 10.

Abdul, can you please tell me what you mean by superknight and supernightrider?

Just want to know.

Knappen is one of the best variant designers, and his work is a huge
inspiration to me. Kudos for an ingenious game with an intriguing type of
nightrider that moves as a camel every other move.

Here is a curiousity I discovered in a game I just started: 

If White moves the f pawn on the first move, black's unprotected pawn at
j10 is threatened by the Pentere, also threatening a nasty double check,
which would force the king to flee. j10 is an unprotected pawn. 

The problem with unprotected pawns in opening positions is not that they
make a more inferior game than otherwise for the second player. That's a
common misconception. It is simply that variations can be forced, giving
the game an immediate tactical edge sometimes not allowing for the
flexibility many prefer to have in their opening choices. For a large
variant, I don't that's a bad thing. 

Please note: The forced moves will only happen if one of the players
decides it would be of advantage to force them, just as it is optional
whether to create the sort of pawn structure which leads to an open or
closed game.

A brilliant game, one of my favorites.

Time Travel Chess can be very sharp.

I suspect time travel must be entered into only extremely sparingly and at very decisive moments. Time Travel can be very fatal or debilitating.

There are three rules you must constantly, constantly bear in mind (like guarding against nightrider forks, they require constant vigilance).

(1) One is that pieces are lost in time if compelled by check to play a different move. One problem with this is that if you time travel with a major piece, your opponent might be able to frivolously check you with a minor piece right before the major piece is destined to arrive, causing you to lose at least an exchange.

(2) A piece can not be lost in time if there is a possible move. That allows your opponent to snatch pieces and / or pawns right before your time traveling piece is destined to arrive. With no recourse.

(3) When time traveling into the past, you must remember that your entire game will become twice as vulnerable if you have two times as many royal pieces that can be checkmated. I think I may have discovered a possible loophole to this, but if so, that will be saved for a later comment. So time traveling into the past may save you from a losing position, but it's usually a desperate measure.

I think the rule of thumb when time traveling into the future is this: Try to make sure that what you are threatening with the returning piece is likely to be greater than what is going to be threatened right before your piece returns.

I consider this to be the most brilliant and thoughtful of all progressive variants, a creation of true chess genius.

I wonder whether a 'Conservative Moderate Progressive' variant would work, where the rules for checks also applied to captures, so that captures were limited to one per move, as with Leandro's Chess. [Correction: In Leandro's Chess, if one wishes to check or capture, that is the only move one is able to make.]

Fergus Duniho comments below that 'grandmasters who had extensive knowledge of opening theory' were interested in adding marshall and cardinal to 8 x 10. Fergus is right that they were likely trying to escape their narrow professional circuit into new frontiers, but the marshall and cardinal had been around for hundreds of years and different size boards, such as Turkish / Indian Great Chess were created to explore these possibilities. We are still exploring them today.

On an 8 x 10 capablanca random board, a number of new asymmetries emerge, distancing it from FIDE Chess. The bishop becomes more powerful and the power of the marshall over the archbishop is great.

What is the Falcon piece? Simply put: One of the greatest innovations to come along in hundreds of years for a board with a length of 8 squares in particular. The Falcon family of pieces perfectly complements the linear sliders as you can tell from this wonderful diagram George Duke created to illustrate their range:

Q  D  D  D  D  Q  D  D  D  D  Q
D  Q  S  S  S  Q  S  S  S  Q  D
D  S  Q  F  F  Q  F  F  Q  S  D
D  S  F  Q  N  Q  N  Q  F  S  D
D  S  F  N  Q  Q  Q  N  F  S  D
Q  Q  Q  Q  Q  X  Q  Q  Q  Q  Q
D  S  F  N  Q  Q  Q  N  F  S  D
D  S  F  Q  N  Q  N  Q  F  S  D
D  S  Q  F  F  Q  F  F  Q  S  D
D  Q  S  S  S  Q  S  S  S  Q  D
Q  D  D  D  D  Q  D  D  D  D  Q

One of the great charms of FIDE Chess is the competition between the bishop and the knight, which are roughly of equal value on that board. Or maybe precisely. In fact, IM Larry Kaufman assigns them the exact same value (3 1/4 compared to 5 for rook, 9 3/4 for queen) and argues this: 'In other words, an unpaired bishop and knight are of equal value (within 1/50 of a pawn, statistically meaningless), so positional considerations (such as open or closed position, good or bad bishop, etc.) will decide which piece is better.'

This is charming because the bishop and the knight are two such disparate pieces and that there should be an underlying symmetry behind this polarity is surprising. There may not exist a single piece in Falcon Chess with equivalent value to the falcon, but when playing with the Falcon piece, one feels a similar pleasing feeling of polarity, of playing with a unique piece that can be competitive among disparate pieces. So it amounts to a great contribution.

The Falcon multi-path piece is one elegant solution to a problem implicit in one of Betza's observations: 'The second rule is that a forward leap which is half or more the height of the board is too dangerous. For example, a piece combining the (0,3) and (0,4) leaps would win heavy material in just a few moves from the opening position.'

Fergus Duniho does not note this but I think George Duke has a leg up on the great Jose Raul Capablanca and eccentric Henry Edward Bird when it comes to designing chess variants. The latter two gentlemen are rightly credited as great classical chess players, but unlike George Duke, they were not chess variant experts and they contributed very little original to the development of chess variants, except mainly to lend their prestige to a lazily constructed 8 x 10 variant that was hundreds of years old. [Added note: This may have been unfair. H. E. Bird probably was something of a chess variant expert. He was certainly a historian of chess development. ]

Usually, unprotected pawns are seen as a liability. In Falcon Chess, they serve to permit the dynamic Falcon piece to play a more interesting part in the opening.

I rate this game excellent and applaud George Duke's initiative in bringing the Falcon piece forward. It has enriched our chess variants world considerably. It is one of the few variants I consider enjoyable enough to be well worthy of serious study. It marks George Duke as one of the greatest contemporary chess variant inventors.

Mats, I think you may be suffering from what Gary Gifford calls the 'green eggs and ham' syndrome. You haven't tried playing this game. I urge you to try playing a game or two of this and then I think you will see that it is in fact, very playable and it may even inspire you to create variants with boards of more diverse types than the ones you tend to favor. I realize that the format may seem overwhelming at first, the 12 x 16 board, but I really don't think that you can criticize something like this before trying it. The fact that larger shogi variants have achieved great success in past centuries gives us a clue as to what may be do-able in the universe of chess variants.

This is a very enjoyable variant, very cutting edge. It features a number of pieces whose relative value is very hard to determine on this long board so, as Greg Strong remarked to me, it turns into a Chess with Different Armies competition where you get to pick your own army depending on the type of exchanges your opponent is willing to allow. I've become very fond of this variant, though I think it may be helpful to use an alternate piece set at least until one is acclimated to seeing the one Greg Strong chose in the way he wishes them to be seen. I'd like to get this alternate piece set added at some point to the original preset so that players can choose which set of pieces they want to use (not sure how to do that right now).

One might add the following consistent changes to go along with it if one were to try to implement that variant of Chess on a Longer Board with a Few Pieces Added:

1. Specify that those two pawns that start on the second rank can make an initial two or three step move (with the usual e.p. rules applied to the extended initial move).

2. Switch Withdrawers with Changelings and have them start out as Halfling rooks rather than Halfling Bishops. This to prevent any piece from audaciously striking out before pawns.

[Scratch what I said here initially as it doesn't address the issue at hand which is how to construct a variant with immediate development of knights. David Howe's kind reader's original idea of allowing knights an initial camel move is quite excellent too.]

[This game is very nice btw, quite excellent.]

Can someone with the technical knowhow please add this type of triangle as one of the building blocks for Game Courier?

Who can help with this? Tony?

I'm very excited to play Graeme's game and also design a trigonal game with different types of tiling riders.

In a private note, I am critical of Graeme for choosing to call the queen spire + bishop since a queen is traditionally bishop + rook.

On a second read, I can see how that happened.

The rook already goes to all the squares the bishop goes to, but to retain its defining feature of colorboundness, the bishop can not behave like a spire. So the nomenclature is a bit odd at first, but ultimately it makes sense.

Kudos, Graeme, BRILLIANT job!

How many variants can one describe as achingly beautiful? Maorider Chess is delightfully rich, an instant classic, a charming gem, a variant masterpiece. The openings have the feeling of formal ritual, like a Japanese tea ceremony. By the time one gets to the middle game, each move feels like a profound thought, worthy of intense concentration. Short range pieces require long range calculations.

The dynamic of the extraordinary recruiting king interacting with the rest of the simpler pieces lends the game a rewardingly edgy, chess-like feeling. Why? Because one is always in this game thinking seriously about the usually conflicting needs for king safety and aggressive offense play, as one does in the sort of risky, double-edged chess games that the most successful professional chess players have often played (such as Semi-Slav, Najdorf Sicilian, Ruy Lopez, King's Indian). One thinks also of the first World Champion Wilhelm Steinitz's Steinitz Gambit (from the Vienna Gambit) in this context. Not to mention the centuries long romantic tradition exemplified by the King's Gambit's domination in chess! Never has a royal piece felt so alive (as in Maorider Chess)!

So...play it 'once...twice...once again' - this one is great.

Anyone who wants to play it with me, I have some invites up... email me if you need help accepting an invite.

Updated to describe a little more why the king in this game gives it an 'edgy, chess-like' feel. It may have seemed like me using the word 'chess-like' was redundant, but in fact, many variants have a decidedly un-chess-like flavor for those of us whose grounding in chess is traditional.