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Joe Joyce wrote on Tue, Apr 10, 2007 03:42 PM UTC:

The superlarge testbed game, Fortress Chess, seems to be clunking along
rather well, even though it's quite early in the game. The problems
forseen are all because I overstuffed the game to test a bunch of things
at once. A more streamlined piece mix and setup should solve what's
expected to be more annoyance than problem. The last question to answer is
the one of combat/capture. It's not unreasonable to think that a good
attack would result in 6 captures in a turn, and a really good one to get
12 captures in 2 turns, while holding the opponent to 4-6 total. Is this
reasonable? Well, with 16 pieces per side, a loss of one FIDE piece
accounts for about 6% of the player's total pieces. With 100 pieces/side,
losing 5-10 pieces is the equivalent of losing one piece of lesser or
greater strength in FIDE. 

Conclusion: chess on 'very large boards' is very doable.

What's next? Stay tuned [or run and hide, depending on your feelings
about this] for the next step up. Is [humanly playable] chess possible on
a 100x100 board?

Andy Maxson wrote on Tue, Apr 10, 2007 03:59 PM UTC:

fortress chess sounds good 100x100 sounds retarded, how will you pl,ay it
you will need a gigantic game courier preset or a bike (or segway) to get
from one end of the board to the other

Andy Maxson wrote on Tue, Apr 10, 2007 04:24 PM UTC:

fortress chess sounds good 100x100 sounds retarded, how will you pl,ay it
you will need a gigantic game courier preset or a bike (or segway) to get
from one end of the board to the other

Joe Joyce wrote on Tue, Apr 10, 2007 08:21 PM UTC:

Andy, thank you very much for the comment; it was about as good as I could
have hoped for. I appreciate especially that you like Fortress.
Truthfully, I'd expected the objections to a much larger game would come
from people who think 'fort' is too big to play. 
The methods of playing very very large games in a limited viewing area
have pretty much been worked out over the years in computer games
[wargames, RPGs, and fusions such as Civilization by Sid Meier]. The
method uses 2 'maps', or views of the board, a tactical [close up or
'normal' size view] and a strategic [a very small version of the
gameboard, all or a major part of which fits on the screen at once]. This
is, admittedly, a departure for chessplayers, because chessboards are so
small they easily fit on a computer screen at a 'normal' size. But it
works quite well and is very easy to get used to, as long as the game
mechanics take into account the need to switch between 2 map sizes. 
The real question is what sort of game mechanics can make a game with
several hundred pieces 'humanly playable.' And in a reasonable number of
turns. I think I have one good answer, and it'll be coming up fairly soon.

David Paulowich wrote on Sun, May 13, 2007 05:49 PM UTC:

I see that this thread now has more than 80 entries. Clicking on Next 25 item(s) does not work for me, so I made up these: skipfirst=25, skipfirst=50, skipfirst=75. Also I am starting a Very Large CVs thread, where we can discuss topics related to Very Large CVs.

Joe Joyce wrote on Tue, Feb 16, 2010 07:26 PM UTC:

'Dale Holmes' Salmon P. Chess has 7500 squares, and the write-up alone
is
worth reading. Dale also did Taiga, a full 10,000 squares, with rules
found on the CVwiki. Sadly, the fine diagram he provided is gone, victim
of a broken link.'

-copy of comment I made Sept 10, 2008, here:
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/listcomments.php?subjectid=Very+Large+CVs

The question is how big can a chess variant get before people won't play
it?

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