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Pocket Mutation and Rococo are excellent examples of track 2s, and both appear among the all-time top 20 games played on Game Courier. Kudos to their designers; they truly deserve it. Most of the games on that list have quite a pedigree. There might well be some worthy candidates there for our hypothetical next chess, too, but this is a track 2 discussion. Lol, this is where the 10 or 15 of us who actually play/understand the truly bizarre games hang out. But among all the really strange games, you find some themes of interest popping up. Multi-move games in general are a bit of a curiosity, but not an area open for any real design work, or at least this seems to be the case. Also in looking through the listed multi-movers onsite, I noticed only the 'standard equipment 8x8' games have a multi-move tag in our submission form. And several games listed as multi-mover are not. This has made it difficult for me to fully research this topic. Pritchard's Classified Encyclopedia of CVs has no different information than this site, and googling provided other places with far less information. It's been an hour since I started this paragraph, during which I re-googled and dug out Pritchard and such and found nothing more. So here, I'm reduced to asking: Are there any more multi-move chess variants out there? One I've learned about rather recently is Fred Lange's Megachess [not to be confused with David Howe's Mega-Chess]. This is the only game I know of [aside from several of my own] that uses the number of kings a player has to determine the number of moves that player may make in a turn. I favor this approach, because it gives an in-game rationale for number of moves per turn, rather than using an arbitrary rule imposed from outside, like the progressive chesses, for example. And it gives a basis for some very interesting effects. At least, I think they're interesting; it remains to be seen whether anyone else does. Guess I'll post some rules and see.
Rich asks if there is a Track 1.5, between tracks 1 and 2. Well, that may be somewhat debatable, but I'd like to walk down to the other end of the platform, to Track 9&3/4. One of the 'fringe' areas in which I know of very little work being done is that of 'giant' pieces. Koksal Karakus designed Giant Chess, which uses a chesspiece [the Dev] that covers 4 squares on the board, in a 2x2 area. There is a wall piece that covers 2 adjacent squares. I'm sure there are other such pieces, but here I'd like to consider a 'giant chesspiece' that is composed of several common chess pieces. Unlike other tries, this 'piece' has one unit that acts as the 'king' for the entire multi-unit piece. Kill the 'king' and the 'piece' is dead, even if bits of its corpse still remain [immobile] on the board. Call the king a brain unit, make a rule that no part [individual unit] of the 'piece' can move without being in direct contact with the brain, use 3 or more different kinds of chesspieces as units, and you have a large piece that can seem to move across the board almost like it was alive. Why bother? Well, it gives the concepts of chesspiece 'powers' and hit points a whole new meaning. You want a piece that can attack at a distance? Put bishops or rooks into it; they can 'fire' out of the piece across the board to capture. They may well be 'one-shot' pieces if used this way, but if you can pick off an enemy brain with one shot, and without exposing your own brain units, it can be very worth it. As far as 'hit points', that's just the number of units in a piece. And power is easily seen then as what kind of units are [remaining] in the multi-square piece. To do this right needs big boards, which is why I suggested the 12x16 board. Because there are 2 levels of organization, there are 2 ways to look at the number of chesspieces in the game. On the lower level, there are 32 pieces per side. On the higher level, there are 4. Each of the 4 is composed of about 8 units, is all. Enjoy.
The last stop on track 1 is games that introduce 2 new pieces, generally on an 8x10 or 10x10 board. The 'traditional' chess expansions, the ones that people do/will/may play, have only 2 pieces difference from western chess. And these 2 pieces are additions to the standard KQRBNP, not replacements for them, in general. Specifically, the variants of Carrera-Capablanca-Grand Chess are the most likely form[s] of the 'next chess'. Fergus Duniho's Eurasian Chess is an outlier of this 'last stop for next chess' - the pieces that are acceptable are quite constrained. The Amazon [QN] is too powerful for track 1; the [BN] and [RN] are acceptable, and the Vao and Pao [Fergus' added pieces in Eurasian] are also, but just barely. Once you get to 3 different pieces in a variant, there is no chance that it will/could become 'the next chess'. From here on out, all stops are on some spur of track 2, the 'non-serious' chess variants. [Need I say that I find these far and away the most interesting? :-) ] None of these games is trying to 'improve' or re-work western chess. They are flat-out explorations of what chess[like] pieces and chess[like] rules are capable of doing. And time has marched on, other comments are accumulating, so this ends in a few sentences. As George has suggested, we can organize the wilder side a bit. Patterns of design and new ideas are starting to emerge from the fringes. This is where the adventure is. I'd like to map out a couple paths to see in which directions they are going. [Btw, George, we both agree, FRC or any 960 variant is a track 1, and probably the first thing FIDE will actually try next - I'd listed Switching and Extinction as track 2s. The impression I got from my 1 game of switching is that there are no already-learned chess strategies you can apply to Switching, so I figure it's too outre.]
How about we have a Track 1.5? Or have some way to make it more granular?
I disagree on FRC and Switching, calling them instead Track One, but they are both in the area of overlap. If there are 5000 CVPage CVs by now, maybe 1500 are Track One (some are only Mutators), 3000 Track Two, and 500 both I and II like Switching. We would agree that your CV of decade Pocket Mutation and my nominee Rococo would both fit here as Track Two. Separately I look at Cannon as ''Hopper'' in follow-up. Is DWAF then same as Mastodon? Joyce says, ''that the pieces are so similar to the western Rook and Bishop, are reasons why I believe they could be acceptable to western players,'' referring to Eurasian and Jacks & Witches Cannon and Canon. However, maybe that is exactly the flaw of Xiangqi with both Cannon and Rook able to reach some very same squares. I am going to run Track One up to at least year 2030, but let us organize this wild-card track too.
After all that discussion about Track 1, I'd like to play around on the other set of tracks. With luck I won't get run over. I see several parts to this [or maybe more]. One area is alternate chesses. The next chess is actually a very-close-to-FIDE alternate chess. Some alternate chesses have names like Shogi or Makruk or Xiang Qi. Eurasian Chess is an alternate chess that is close to western chess. There are many games that are nowhere close to any national or larger chess but nonetheless are serious, high-quality games. Several designers' games pop into my head, but not wishing to name too many names, I'll try to generalize about styles, looking at them from the viewpoint of new pieces introduced. First, you've got games that introduce no new pieces, but re-arrange, add to, subtract from, move them differently, and put them on different boards. Some, like Fischer Random, are serious, others, like Switching or Extinction, are strictly for fun; definite Track 2s. Next, games that introduce 1 new piece. These games' 'strategy' is to be as chesslike as possible, in general. Chancellor and Janus are 2 'type specimens' of this sort of game. These are all track 1 games, until you get to the more 'outrageous' pieces. And I'll end this post with a little digression on the pieces used here. The most common extra pieces are N+B, N+R, and N+Q, the 'long-range trio' of western combination pieces. However, it is gratifying to see a number of designers using short-range pieces. The DWAF, which moves 1 or jumps straight over a neighbor square to the 2nd square, is a very nice piece in this role, and just might make the bigger jump into being used more often. However, other, more exotic pieces - pieces with unusual move or capture modes - switch any of these games that contain them from track 1 to track 2. I speculate that the eastern-style pieces used in Eurasian Chess, the cannon and the arrow, are right on the cusp of what western orthochess players will accept. That the cannon already exists in a major game, and the pieces are so similar to the western bishop and rook, are reasons I believe the pieces could be acceptable to western players.
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