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Game Reviews by gwalla

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Shogi With Pokémons. Pokemons with special powers are added to an otherwise normal shogi board. (11x11, Cells: 121) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Garth Wallace wrote on Mon, Dec 7, 2009 11:09 PM UTC:Poor ★
'Pokemon' is an invariant plural (as has been pointed out before), unless you are a LOLcat. Also, Japanese is a language and an ethnicity, but not a location. And finally, calling a piece a 'bushido' is like calling a piece a 'chivalry' or an 'existentialism'.

Rating this poor because, aside from language issues, it is unplayable as written. Literally. It simply does not give enough information for somebody to be able to play a game of it.

Mad Scientist Chess. Fetch me the Pawn, Igor! (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Garth Wallace wrote on Tue, Dec 8, 2009 12:40 AM UTC:Good ★★★★
Good goofy fun. Also, props for namedropping Girl Genius! ;)

One question, though: the instructions specifically say that you can attach a move part to an enemy piece, but why would you do that? I can't think of any situation where that would it would be advantageous to do that: it deprives you of a part you could add to one of your pieces, and gives your opponent more options. There's no real impetus to dispose of parts you can't use in this way (even spoilage is preferable, I would think). Was this rule included only to fit the theme, or does it have a real impact on gameplay?

A variation might be to have grafts remain under the control of the player who added them, regardless of who originally owned the piece. So if black grafted a fers to a white knight, he could move that piece as a fers (but not as a knight), potentially capturing a white piece. What's more mad-sciencey than mind control? Shades of The Other...

Of course, this ruleset could easily be applied to any of the various capablancoid large-army variants. And what about alfil & dabbabah components, or some way of breaking down bent riders? The potential for new crimes against nature seems limitless!

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