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Gary Gifford wrote on Sun, Sep 16, 2007 11:56 PM UTC:
Latrunculi was given a poor rating for 6 reasons or points.  Now it seems that the poor rating is reduced to one point being, 'simply because the full piece mix was used before, without even acknowlegement.'   

A point of confusion is that I acknowledged Shogi (from where I borrowed the R+f and B+w pieces.  But in an attempt to please someone I also added acknowledgement to Duke of Rutlands which is a 10 x 14 board game. The 140 square game has pieces I do not use in the 64 square Latrunculi.  It has  Concubine; Rook; Bishop.  Latrunculi has none of these and uses a standard chess board.  The two games are hardly anything alike.  I've played Duke of Rutlands, I like it.  I never even thought of it while making Latrunculi... I did think of promoted Shogi pieces.

Many games use pieces that have been used before.  Look at Chessgi. Look at The Logical Follow Up to the Duke of Rutlands (isn't that far closer to that game than is Latrunculi?) Look at Fischer Random Chess, Avalanche Chess, Maxima compared to Ultima, etc.  Look at Gothic Chess (my goodness, that one just has 2 pieces in a different position from the game it is based on).  

I have not seen this Latrunculi before.  Yes, it uses pieces we know about.  I admit it.  I admit I invented none of them.  It is a variant... we can expect that to mean it varies from something but is otherwise similar in certain respects.

Now, on a different note, I read in the recent comment, 'There are no 6-point criteria. That's silly.'  So, I guess that means Latrunculi was judeged 'poor' the first time due to 'silly criteria.' 

The Latrunculi comment preceding this one has a lot of text to it.  I could reply to all of it.  But why?  What good would it do?  In fact, I thought we had all this variant stuff out of the wash and out to dry.  I guess not.

Some basics regarding my variant - there was a complaint about references... so I added them.  There was a complaint about not discussing the Latin meaning, so I added that... neither, of which, affect game play.  Game play, interestingly enough, was not discussed.  And you think that would be important. 

How I see it:  Latrunculi duo milia et septum is a new variant that uses previously known pieces on a previously known 8x8 board.  It is a new game and has a right to exist.  Should we find that it already exists we can remove my rules and rename the pre-set.  But I have a very strong feeling that we won't find a pre-existing version.

Hopefully we can close the door on this one.  It is obvious that myself and another have strong disagreements about this game.  Can we not just admit that we disagree and leave it at that?

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