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You correctly noticed that the server is not finished. The help files are a
minor problem; it is just a matter of putting a text file with the
corresponding name in a certain directory. But so far I only had time for
making descriptions of the more common variants that were not so common
that I thought a description was not needed.

The examin support is something I would have to look in to. I don't even
know what examining a game is, on an ICS. There might be a problem with
restoring the variant; I also noticed that when you have an adjourned game
that is automatically resumed when you match the same opponent, it is not
announced as the correct variant, so WinBoard often thinks the moves are
illegal. I will definitely have to fix that.

I am not very happy with the way the game rules are implemented in this
server. For every piece type there is separate code. And not only one
routine, but two: one to determine if a given move is (pseudo-)legal, and
another one to generate all moves for that piece. This makes it hard to add
new pieces; I'd rather seen that the whole process is table-driven, the
table with piece definitions being read from an external file. The
flexibility suggested by having a dedicated routine for every piece is also
largely illusory. If you would want to use it to implement pieces with side
effects, such as Mats' Catapult pieces, it turns out checkmate testing
does not work anymore: it hinges on testing if any of the moves from an
opponent piece to the King is pseudo-legal, and would not notice if the
King is captured by a side effect. This part of the code should be
completely redesigned. Another inconveniece is that there is no
variant-dependent mapping of pieces to letters. This forces me to have
duplicates of the code to handle certain piece types just to make sure that
they can be used in one variant onder one name, and in another under
another name.

I think that an ICS of this type caters to a different kind of audience
than you describe. There are plenty of people that ar not interested in
designing variants, but just want to play one particular variant. And as a
consequence know it well enough that they want to play it as a blitz or
even bullet game, rather than as corresponcence chess. You won't find
those people here on CVP, of course, but they do exist. Especially for 10x8
Chess.

To experiment with new rules, it is questionable if a rule-enforcing
server is needed or even desirable. I think it should be easy enough to add
one 'free' variant where the ICS acts only as a passive chess board, not
unlike WinBoard edit-position mode, where each player can grab any piece
and move it wherever he wants. Even if it is an opponent piece, or when it
is not his turn. They should be able to set up an arbitrary opening
position on boards of various sizes, and then simply move the pieces
around.