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I totally agree with Fergus there, I actually had this concept in mind but unfortunately did not bother with finding the quote so thanks. But that does not preclude the possibility (I obviously cannot speak for Fergus but I'm as sure as I can be that he would agree with me) that this could very well be a problem with several solutions. i mean there are sheep, cows and goats. They are all fine herbivores. And most likely it is by the laws of big numbers .

Also even more, Fergus mentioned (I don't recall the literal way) while recommending Gross Chess that there is room for niche variants, meaning people who like crazier (but definitely not inconsistent things) variant using joker or weird board topologies or who knows what?

About the forum link, I had not read each line but I get the point and you are correct. It is well done. Actaully Betza's articles (some touching exactly on this) were my entry point on this website :)!

I don't see how this can even be a point of discussion. The fact that other variants than orthodox Chess exist that are more popular in the world as a whole, and certainly more popular in the areas where they originated shows that things like board size and how exactly the pieces move can very well be different without jeopardizing the success of the game. How we play Chess is mostly determined by historic accident.

Pieces like Knight are not a necessity; e.g. Chu Shogi, which was the dominant Chess variant in Japan for many centuries, doesn't have Knights. The idea of a Knight is rather obvious: it has the closest move that a Queen does not have. Oblique moves increase the variety of moves. This contributes to the appeal of the game, because it allows attacks on other pieces that are not automatically reciprocated. But Shogi addresses this by having the pieces move in non-8-fold-symmetric ways, or limit their sliding range, so that the table of what can safely attack what can be dense enough without oblique moves.

Most rules of Chess serve a purpose, but that doesn't automatically imply they are the unique solution to the problem they cure. E.g. without double push (or on a deeper board) the opening would be boringly slow. But Asian variants solve this by starting the Pawns in more advanced locations.

The rule 'stalemate = draw' seems rather arbitrary to me. The biggest impact of that rule is that it makes the KPK end-game more drawish. I am not sure if that should be seen as an advantage. It also doesn't seem to matter much whether the initial setup has reflection or rotation symmetry. Whether the white King starts on the left or right half of the board I would not even consider a rule change.

Where is it documented that Chu Shogi was the dominant Chess variant in Japan for centuries?

HG,

I'm not exactly sure what can't be the point of the discussion. Is that the fact the several nextchesses could happen. That was the point I'm making to couter-balance the idea of a dominat "next variant" which used to be at least pretty popular on this website. Indeed to me it is obvious that there is not just one "good" solution but several. But it is probably not obvious for everybody :)!

Anyway even if pieces like knights (and most other stuff maybe) are not necessities, anyone ca easily argue that combining styles could bring new interesting concepts, higher truths if I may. Sure new way of getting into trouble when designing are to be taken care of, but in opposition to most people I think more is better for the forgeable future (I don't mean 32x32 games, I mean feasible more).

I think chess popularity had an accidental side to it. It so happened that a good game had not an equal competitor and a snowball effect took place. But the interesting part if why is a good game. This discussion is overly done so no point into getting here again. But waht about the future? This was my point. I guess I did not get it across nicely :)!

I was unaware any chess variant (or board game of pure skill) was currently more popular than chess globally. I had trouble as it is tracking down the figures for Chinese Chess, Shogi and Go (40 million) that I've seen, aside from FIDE's well-known claim of 600 million adults playing chess.

Regarding the pieces other than K & Q, I see R and B as the two logical sliders to include, as ranks, files and diagonals are natural terms for most people to visualize movements in. The chess N I see as a piece type trying to logically/simply compliment the B, in a way, since it moves to the second closest squares of the opposite colour to which it started on. If it moved to the closest opposite coloured squares, a N would be a weak version of a rook, and not anywhere near in value to a B on 8x8. The latter would also be true if a N were lame like its Chinese Chess counterpart (something I didn't bother to mention in my blog entry). Then there's that a N makes a move that a Q cannot.

Stalemate I wrote a bit about in my blog entry. The main point was that good defence is not punished, whereas often poor prosecution of a winning advantage is punished, aside from all the wonderful draw-saving stalemate combinations that can occur in chess. [edit: For what it's worth, I also mentioned that nice smothered and back rank mates are possible due to the pawns starting on the second rank in chess.]

My blog entry is only meant as a provocative stab at the subject of whether the rules of chess are arbitrary - it seems almost everyone takes for granted that they are. Maybe this might prove the stuff of idle philosophical debate for some, but it may be relevant to grasping what principle(s) might govern any quest for judging/finding or creating a chess variant that proves to be massively popular at some point, if Fergus is right about the rules of chess not being arbitrary, in some sense (thanks to how the game evolved into its modern form, with many largely rejected forms along the way). Regarding other chess variants that may qualify, in my blog entry I was somewhat critical of Circular Chess since for one thing R+K cannot normally mate lone K, but a counterpoint is that at least K+P always beats lone K since stalemate is impossible - an example of how at least some chess variants can compensate for things they may lack compared to chess. It's just how good potential steady players think that the compensation is, assuming they've been exposed to chess itself.

The Knight doesn't just complement the Bishop. It complements both the Bishop and the Rook, because it leaps to the nearest spaces that these two pieces cannot reach. 

@Fergus

&the rest

I agree that the knight move is complemtenting both the diagonal and orthogonal move. But I like to point out something once Betza has said that it is very helpfull coincidence that the very different knight and bishop are so close in value on an 8x8 board. That is in a way arbitrary (in the way in the usual math pi is 3,.14... maybe someone with better philosophy background could explaid that sort of arbitrariness better) but the emerging properties of that are quite nice as now more diverse endgames are possible.

That the Knight is roughly equivalent in power to a Bishop was probably one of the factors that contributed to it being used in Chess. If the Knight were as weak as a Wazir or Ferz, it might have been replaced by a Knightrider, and if it were as powerful as an Amazon, it might have been omitted.

@HG,

By the way, technically the Chu shogi lyon has a knight move, even a enhanced one actually. But anyway the hippogonal pieces are are very basic thing to need to compensate for :)!

@Fergus

I agree with you and I think the lesson to bear in mind is that we should aim for such things in future games. For example my probably only criticism to gross chess is the unchanged knight. You said once that that makes it more a defense piece because otherwise you lose turns in order to get the knight to go offensive. But nothing is exchangeable for knight, as the vao is likely weaker (this could not be true in the opening though). I tend to think natural knights for 12x12 could be LT (camel-treaper which is colourbound but has a nice distribution of destinations), ZH (zebra-threeleaper), CH (camel-treeleaper) and ZT (zebratreaper). The need 4 moves to exit the board starting in the oposite edge which makes them relatively "as" fast, but they are a bit more awkward to use. They are probably a bit stronger than 12x12 bishops as per increased forking power. Also they work differently with pawn chains. So maybe to get the chess feel you should allow pawns to always be able to go 2 squares to either move or capture with keeping en passant always :)!

I think there is a fair chance that Chess in its various forms is the world's most popular board game, or thereabouts, but if FIDE claim 600 million adults play Chess (and presumably they mean play Western chess regularly) they are claiming perhaps one in eight of the world's adult population do so - a big claim indeed.

Shaye Nicholls (pp Glenn Nicholls)

Somehow there might be a case for Chinese Chess lacking or mostly lacking in arbitrariness, which could fit into Fergus' thesis about any Next Chess candidate, as Chinese Chess is hugely popular (if possibly less so than chess). I think I'd have to strain myself a bit harder to figure out a plausible argument for why the considerably popular shogi (Japanese Chess) would also be lacking [at least mostly] in arbitrariness (that goes double for Chu Shogi), in view of the way the generals move seemingly so oddly, alone. At least by coincidence, shogi seems far less popular than Chinese Chess (or chess), though the real reason would seem to be that China has long had a much larger population than Japan.

If it's accepted chess is by far the most popular chess variant globally, I repeat I'd think any Next Chess would likely be some sort of extention of chess, though that could mean plausible candidates for such could be among the larger-board-size, different sliders and leapers crowd that H.G. has in the past expressed his disdain for, if nothing else due to his preference for ground-breaking variants. The latter may be becoming harder to come up with if they are of any quality, though, aside from that they may prove too complex rulewise at times for the average western grandpa or young child.

Today I was thinking about possible obstacles to more than one chess variant being played by several (or many) people face-to-face presently (or in future) at given location(s), ideally at CV clubs (but at the least at some CVs tournament held at a physical site). One matter is how to determine which variant(s) will be played (all year round or even on one given day), e.g. in a club, but what may entirely determine this at any given time is the CV equipment available at a given location, for a given time period.

We've heard of card sharks, who are good at all sorts of card games that use a standard 52 card deck, but CV sharks might be harder to ever come by in large numbers in offline play, since all CVs do not use the same equipment. Still, offline CV tournaments (or clubs) that involve a relatively small number of CVs (not always the same ones, necessarily) might become relatively common one day. Standardized, mass produced CV equipment that can be used for a large number of existing CVs would be helpful. CVs that can use the same equipment as for chess (maybe with a small number of extra pieces added, as in Seirawan Chess) would be particularly golden, for the time being at least.

There's also the problem of how to make more people interested enough in CVs locally, though a potential CV physical club (or tournament) organizer can learn from any local Bridge, Chess, Go etc. club or tournament organizer that they might know. An extra chore could be to make a pamphlet about whatever are deemed to be the most essential CV 'basics' (besides the CV club/tournament location & hours info) to distribute locally, perhaps even in schools. At the moment tournaments for bughouse just by itself (or as side events to more serious children's chess tournaments) have something of a foothold, in Canada at least, now more often with cash prizes involved. Face-to-face events have one advantage, based on the experience of chess players and organizers, in that perhaps any cheating (especially with cash prizes at stake) could be easier to detect than for online play (sticking to the latter alone has some big advantages otherwise, as we have seen with Game Courier's features, plus chess and/or CV servers that offer fast [e.g. 5-minutes per side] time controls for CV players, for the given CVs that are available to choose from).

Meanwhile, here's a link provided on this very website, which includes mention of a CV Construction Kit:

https://www.chessvariants.com/where.html

John Davis wrote: "Hobby Lobby sells checkered fabric with 2 1/2 inch squares. It's 17 squares across and as long as you want. For pieces, printing out your favorite graphics and glueing them to poker chips is the easiest."

Thanks for the reply, John. By a websearch, I've seen that Hobby Lobby's online store does business with a very large number of countries outside of the USA.

The vast majority of CVs would seem to use square or rectangular shaped boards, so the checkered fabric would seem to be potentially quite a useful resource, say for use in [school] clubs. The use of poker chips plus glued-on printouts for pieces would certainly be alright for school sets, IMHO. Future CV club(s) with adults might be more finicky about wanting to have 3 dimensional pieces with their CV boards, at least after some time passes, I'd guess, but by then the club(s) would have a body of members that might be willing to pay (through any increased membership dues) for 3D CV pieces, if there are insufficient said pieces available to the club(s) otherwise. A problem with my theory there, though, is that 3D CV pieces still seem quite expensive, especially if a large number are to be bought (not to mention what happens if at least some of the said pieces are eventually broken or 'lost'). Maybe there's another way out, though, if a 3D printer can be used to produce 3D CV pieces cheaply (or there's CVP's ideas for homemade 3D CV pieces made in an old-fashioned way - in particular, altering existing plastic 3D chess pieces).

[edit: Googling the search term "3d printing chess variant pieces" seems to yield some interesting results.]

Could there ever be a meaningful world chess variants championship? This may just be a silly question, in that the answer might seem to be that, since obviously there are limitless CVs possible (and CVs are being invented all the time), there could be no meaningful CVs world championship possible (the opposite being true in the case of a given single CV).

Nevertheless, Mind Sports championships are regularly held now, although one might argue that since the choice of 'mind sports' played by the contestants is to some extent rather arbitrary, the winner of such a championship has a somewhat nebulous honour at best.

If we in the CV community ever in future wish to confine a similar sort of championship to a carefully selected set of CVs, to be the basis of a CVs world championship tournament or match(es), how might such a selection of CVs ever give the winner of such a CV world championship a clearer sort of honour, relatively close to as is the case for a chess world championship winner, for example?

Our website chessvariants.com offers its own lists of what are (currently!?) considered the 'best' CVs, although such lists would at some point, to satisfy such a careful selection process, need to be narrowed down to a smaller, single list of (currently) 'best' CVs, perhaps based primarily (if not exclusively) on the currently most popular CVs played. If this could be done by a world CV authority organization at some point (or perhaps simply by eliminating all but CVs [if ever significantly more than one] from a future Mind Sports list of games etc. for their championships), a world CVs championship might to some extent be meaningful. Note that as newer CVs eventually become popular enough, they could be taken into account in the selection process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_sport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_championships_in_mind_sports

I'm not sure if the comunity is large enough to warrant such a competition. Nor the audience. Maybe we should stick to organizing tournaments here :)!

Which reminds me, I'm putting together an outline for Game Courier Tournament 2019 now.  Stay tuned!

@ Aurelian:

Remember, this thread is all about ideas for the future of Cvs, maybe even the far future, perhaps. :)

Even with that said, there's already a list of my own I could suggest of 10 fairly well-known and relatively popular CVs, which might form the basis of even a not-too-distant-future CVs world championship, perhaps (note if ever an arrangement with Mind Sports competitions could be made, there'd be less need for an overall world CVs body, maybe). The list starts with the 3 Classics from the chessvariants.com Recognized Variants page (although these 3 are in the Mind Sports Olympiad already, albeit via the way it is currently organized):

1. Chess;

2. Shogi (Japanese Chess);

3. Xiangqi (Chinese Chess);

4. (4 player) Bughouse;

5. Crazyhouse;

6. Fischer Random (aka Chess960);

7. Grand Chess;

8. Glinski's Hexagonal Chess;

9. Circular Chess;

10. Seirawan Chess.

Makruk is conspicuously absent from that list.

But in a chess-variants contest I would avoid variants for which a large body of opening theory exists. Participants are likely to come from one of these backgrounds, and would then be hugely advantaged when they play those games against players from another background. Next to Xiangqi, Chess and Shogi, Makruk and Jiangi probably should be disqualified on that count too.

It does seem good to have variants in there that are reminiscent of all these major chess variants, though, so that (say) Shogi players cannot complain that all the games are too 'chess-like', etc. Chess960 would be OK, but if you already have that, orthodox Chess just seems 'more of the same'. Unfortunately there don't seem to be similar variants of Xiangqi and Shogi; in fact Xiangqi variants are hardly existent.

We could of course make up some slightly modified versions of these games, which would not have any popularity by themselves, but act as substitutes for the over-popular variants. E.g. Shogi with an extra Copper General in front of the King, promoting to an (8-fold) Knight, or Xiangqi where Elephants are allowed to cross the River. (To name a few "10-sec variants".)

We should consider a formula 1 like competition using computers, and maybe desing games with that in mind. This is what apothecary series is about but I cannot obviosly claim that I know better :)!

@ H.G.:

Regarding CVs with a large body of opening theory, it would seem it's tough to avoid that if the relative popularity of a CV is to be an important criteria for inclusion in a CVs world championship event. Mind Sports abstract games competitions include the big 3 classic CVs (chess, shogi and chinese chess), and the organizers must have considered the edge some players might have over others in playing 1 or more of these 3 CVs (although the number is very small, being just 3 games, which may allow participants some time to bone up on opening theory of up to all 3 of these CVs, if necessary).

Regarding Makruk, I had the impression it was a largely regional CV, in a way moreso than shogi (or any of the other CVs on my suggested list of 10 CVs), but I am far from sure. On a personal note, when I glanced at Makruk's wiki, I found the rules a bit elaborate to follow, with regard to the draw result conditions (though chess has some, albeit rarely arising, special drawing case rules, too). I would hope a CV would be played by, say, at least 0.5 million people to be deemed indisputably popular enough even for Mind Sports, which I saw included Renju, which is a more interesting form of Go Moku. That may currently rule out something as interesting as Circular Chess, but I recall Glinski's Hexagonal Chess at least at one time had something like 0.5 million playing. The first two links below include popularity figures for the games in question:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makruk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess#Gliński's_hexagonal_chess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renju

[edit: The Oriental Variants link on chessvariants.com, under "Games" in the main menu, seems to have quite a fair number of variants that are at least remotely like Chinese Chess, especially if something like Storm the Ivory Tower is counted, though I suspect few have any truly significant degree of popularity:]

Xiangqi Based Variants

@ Aurelian: At the moment chess has seperate world events for computer vs. computer contests, and maybe still once in a while there are Man+Machine vs. Man+Machine contests. The last I heard of Man vs Machine, the machine side was giving odds in matches to make things more interesting - including the machine having less time to think. As far as any relatively new CV, even, having a similar contest, I think it won't take too long before a reasonably well programmed/self-teaching machine would need to give odds to the best human, too.

@ Everyone: A fresh idea of mine that also may seem rather unrealistic (at the moment, anyway) is for chessvariants.com, arguably the main CV website on the internet, to simply run an annual world CVs championship tournament of its own and then declare the winner to be world CVs champion for that year. Obstacles could include: 1) how to distinguish ourselves from any other website or offline organization later claiming to do the same; 2) how to try to take any anti-cheating measures, if the honour of the title is to be taken very seriously (one measure might be to play just newer or obscure CVs in such an event, to try to more easily avoid the chance of any undetected CV engine assistance, in spite of what I wrote above in my reply to H.G. re: popularity of CVs selected may matter); 3) at some point, how to provide a prize ($, or a trophy, or CV product[s] of some sort, or simply a news story in any media that will take notice) - any entry fee for this type of event may help; 4) how to have enough people playing on Game Courier, compared to some of the other possibly more active CVs (or chess+CVs) servers or play-by-mail sites out there. All in all, this may be a tall order, though so may be trying to get the attention of the already established and well organized Mind Sorts organization, if that were ever to be tried.

I agree with your points Kevin.

But human online competitions are virtually impossible to be held online and still be engine free.

For the online media cyborg chess is the best option.

And human tournaments are expensive.

Anyway here is a list of my preferred games: Grand Chess, Omega Chess, Shako, Eurasian Chess, Gross Chess, 8 stones chess, CWDA. Say we organize these in the same location. Worldwide there are always high travel costs. But besides that. If you organize the tournaments more or less separately in order to avoid fixture clashes as much as possible, you will have a huge schedule on your hands. Very unfeasible most likely. Fergus once proposed to hold each round with a different game. I don't think that is that fair either as some games are more drawish  than others, for example. Moreover if we are talking about a swiss system then the games that are first are less important. And you won't get enough world championships to make enough permutations to make it at lest long term fair.

As of now (20th of January 2019) I don't see clear solutions to these problems.

Guys?

If you want live tournaments, it will probably be best to let someone other than myself handle it. I have no experience in running live tournaments, I went to maybe one Chess tournament before quitting the Chess club in high school, and I don't travel much. I'm more into the variety of Chess variants than I am into the intense competition of the Chess world.

@ Aurelian:

Regarding online cheating via computer assistance, the better chess servers try to detect that for chess, but it's like an arms race in that there are a lot of chess engines out there, old and new. So, even a serious online chess competition may be an expensive proposition. Arimaa (a heavily licensed game) has it's own approved website, which runs its own world championship. Not sure how anti-computer cheating works for that, but since a couple of years ago the best computer program is now also the world's best player. For a CVs website to hold a very serious multiple CVs event online, maybe (or maybe not?) trying to prevent computer cheating is even more of a nightmare for potential organizers. Note that it seems that it's easier to take anti-computer cheating measures for offline chess events than for online ones, but then there are still costs involved in running such events.

Cyborg (Man+Machine) competitions could avoid that trouble, but for CV players I'm not sure there could be a level playing field from the point of view of who has access to the best software and hardware, alone (at least if a competition is to be online). There's also that there might be less interest in CVs cyborg competitions, as, at the least, in the case of CVs, we haven't even yet established who the best human CVs players are, if that's close to possible.

One irony here is that long ago I read a very old book (Computers, Chess and Long-Range Planning), on creating a strong chess program, by world chess champion M. Botvinnik, who opined that once there was such an engine, man would have acquired a tireless helper. He may not have cared about the slight loss of dignity for the world's best human chess players in the future, but it also seems he didn't forsee the ease with which people nowadays can obtain computers and engines, allowing for the possibility of somewhat frequent computer assisted cheating, that today causes so many headaches and concerns.