Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
George Duke wrote on Sat, Dec 20, 2008 11:38 PM UTC:Good ★★★★
What this CV does is try to level the field of division between pieces and mutators. Are they really distinct, pieces and mutators? Invention, discovery or even reuse of a piece should dictate its own proper mutator(s). And conceiving a mutator ought to draw on only certain appropriate pieces, very limited in number, in turn. Humour? Not playing the CVs? Get real. Ralph Betza, the absolute best at CVs after Thomas Raynor Dawson, indicated specifically, I would say, 25% of the time he has not played his article's CVs, all 200 basic ones of them. 99% of CV material is not serious stuff but artwork, pure and simple, enjoyable, aesthetic artwork, impossible to be played widely. Betza's every article is nuanced toward amusement and humour, even his important piece-value attempts. Oldtimer Dawson's (1889-1951) very substantial studies of problem themes outside of OrthoChess are laced with entertainment. That is exactly where Fairy Chess embarks over a century ago, putting the fun back into Chess and taking the grim reality out of oddball chess inventions, the ''CVs'' of their time, before they were called CVs, such as Ben Foster's Chancellor Chess, commercially presented. The more important sideline, since Capablanca, is Track One OrthoChess replacement, transcending the bombast of boring GMs and wornout Fide Chess. V.R. Parton: entertaining foremost, having playability secondarily. Gridlock: satire. Stanley Random: sarcasm. ''91.5 Trillion...'': trying to be serio-comic after Betza's style with leaning toward genuine research. Gilman's every article, 1 to 200: irony and understatement. Editor Glenn Overby: humour in wild combinations of pieces. Lavieri: funny complexity worth playing. Smith's style is succinct and almost automatically playable, in some subvariants, because of good grounding in prior art. This Weak Combo and Strong Combo reminds me precisely of an Overby set of pieces implemented -- why I mention his particular orthogonal artwork. Did Overby playtest Beautiful Sun Chess, a mix of pieces reminiscent of these? Not likely much, but it is pretty work to behold momentarily, as art.

Edit Form

Comment on the page Weak Combo Chess and Strong Combo Chess

Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.