Kevin Pacey wrote on Sat, Sep 24, 2016 11:40 AM UTC:
Hi Aurelian
My opinion would be just one man's, and I'm relatively new to chess variants myself. Fergus may be right in that familiar pieces may give a game a head start as far as being more accepted, say in becoming heavily played on Chess Variant Pages' Game Courier (possibly with some time needed for a game to become more and more popular). That's if you take the trouble to make a Game Courier preset for your game. It might encourage you that I'd guess Shogi (Japanese Chess) may have seemed a little strange to people right after it was first invented, as far as having certain pieces with asymmetrical, complex movements goes (e.g. the Gold & Silver Generals). The road of a pioneer or inventor is not always a smooth or sure one. I've felt in my gut that chess variants I've invented may excite people, only to change my mind later in a lot of cases (though I'm prone to changing my mind a lot, anyway). As far as my tastes go, I like games with fairly simple rules, boards and piece movements, but there are a lot of people who play what I think are strange or uninteresting chess variants, at least on Game Courier.
Hi Aurelian
My opinion would be just one man's, and I'm relatively new to chess variants myself. Fergus may be right in that familiar pieces may give a game a head start as far as being more accepted, say in becoming heavily played on Chess Variant Pages' Game Courier (possibly with some time needed for a game to become more and more popular). That's if you take the trouble to make a Game Courier preset for your game. It might encourage you that I'd guess Shogi (Japanese Chess) may have seemed a little strange to people right after it was first invented, as far as having certain pieces with asymmetrical, complex movements goes (e.g. the Gold & Silver Generals). The road of a pioneer or inventor is not always a smooth or sure one. I've felt in my gut that chess variants I've invented may excite people, only to change my mind later in a lot of cases (though I'm prone to changing my mind a lot, anyway). As far as my tastes go, I like games with fairly simple rules, boards and piece movements, but there are a lot of people who play what I think are strange or uninteresting chess variants, at least on Game Courier.