Game Reviews by Florin Lupusoru

This is a good idea but I would have included more randomness into it. We are talking about computers beating humans at chess. We need to make the chess game impossible for computers to analyse. If the chess pieces for this game were something Reversi like, where you can flip a piece and turn it into a completely different and random piece, that would flip upside down the entire strategy of chess, giving humans more advantage against computers.

That was a good review of the game. Thank you for your time. I have added the repetition rule. As for the territorial merging, it's hard enough to control a single territory and prevent it from invasion. On a bigger territory that will be even harder. You are right about the black King from e5 having the possibility to push the white bishop to c5 but that wouldn't win additional points for black. The "three of a kind" rule should also imply the same colour too. Also, the new territory created at e5 would give the white player even more points.

I think this piece caled Sissa is great, but I would remove acute angles (45 and 315 degrees) and only keep obtuse angles (135 and 225 degrees). 

I would also remove the rule that both moves have to be of the same length. This will create a new piece that can make an absolute mess on the chessboard. 

These are probably just a bunch of silly ideas. However, some of these variants might give somewhat nice strategic games. I hope I did not offend go players with my unusual description of their game.

This was a good attempt at mixing Chess with Go. However, in my humble opinion, in order to make this game work we need to keep the number of "liberties" to four, not eight, otherwise the game might become unecessarily messy and impossible to finish. 

A second rule should be to only keep pieces that move orthogonally only. This means that only  Rooks and restricted Kings (Kings that only move orthogonally) are allowed to join the game.

Alternativelly, we can also invent some pieces that move in zig-zag.

Knights can also be included with the restriction that they can only move along empty squares. 

Good news! You can play Scramble against Stockfish on Chess.com. 

You have no idea just how insane this game is.

Here is how to do it:

• Go to Chess,com
• Go to Learn / Analysis /Set Up Position / Clear Board
• Place pieces on the board according to the rules of Scramble
• Practice vs Computer
• Change Bot
• Play!

Interesting concept. It might be more difficult to attack the enemy King from the flank because Bishops will have to travel in zig zag and Knights will be too powerful. But I like the idea. 

Here is my humble suggestion on how to improve this game.

Use a 7x7 board.

7x7 = 49. 

Add 4 extra squares on the corners.

49+4 = 53. 

Add a Jocker to the stack of cards and you are done. 

You can also give additional powers to the Jocker and the King cards. 

So, what do you think? 

It's a shame that great ideas are buried and forgotten. This game has a great potential and I'm really impressed by such a simple idea. 

Also, this game deserves a better name. 

Four stars for the original chessboard.

This game was very popular almost two centuries ago and lots of famous people used to play it. 

Complicated problems most of the time have simple solutions. You could have put both Bishops on one side of the board, and both Knights on the other side. And the opponent will have them the other way around. Simple. 

Another solution would be to add an extra piece (A Shield Bearer/Scutier to protect the King) and make the board 10x8. 

Two of the pieces used here (Phoenix and Medusa) I will be using in my Titanic Chess but I'll have to use different moving and capturing abilities for that purpose. Since these are mythological creatures I have to disagree with the way they are used to move and capture in this game. But appart from that, this looks like a great game. 

Is chess [still] important? An older member of my chess club once opined in the new millennium that chess is no longer as important as before. I didn't ask what he meant. To me, chess reached its high mark in the 1970's, mainly with the Geo-political stakes involved in the Fischer-Spassky match, and later the Karpov-Korchnoi one. Chess was also important back then since it was seen as a test for AI whether a machine can beat a highly skilled human player at the game. Chess suffered to some degree because of what followed historically, in both cases.

In the TikTok era Chess is more relevant than ever. In a world were people are increassingly lacking concentration, playing chess can not only help people maintain focus, but also evade the modern insanity. 

When chess meets witchcraft. I am against the idea of turning chess players into witches and wizards, but here we are. Sadly, there are lots of similar games that use spells, magic, and predictions. Why do we even call them chess variants? 

Life, the Universe and Everything is a Chess variant inspired by the works of the late Douglas Adams. It is a double-move variant with unusual pieces on a board of (of course) 42-squares.

A game with a pretentious title that adds nothing to chess. I don't care how famous the author was. If "the answer to everything is 42", the author refuses to further explain his reason for choosing such a number. 

Of course, the elites know what 42 really means, and are terrified. 

This looks like a good idea but I am not so sure of its practicality. The board might end up very crowded and we need to see a game simulation before deciding on its "greatness". 

The 4 stars are only for the name. I like the idea of using Cleopatra as a seducing piece.

I had this idea of making pieces switch sides for a long time, but I always thought that the person in charge of finances could do this job, which is more realistic.