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Catapults of Troy. Large variant with a river, catapults, archers, and trojan horses! (8x11, Cells: 88) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Sam Trenholme wrote on Wed, Mar 15, 2006 06:52 PM UTC:
A lot of draws often times indicates that a game is unbalanced; basically, a weak player can force a draw against a strong player. As it turns out, it's actually harder to fix a drawish game than it is to fix a game where white always win; a 'white always wins' game can usually be fixed with the pie rule; a drawn game needs to be fixed by changing the game to be less drawn (usually by making attack stronger and defense weaker) [1].

Here is some empirical evidence:

Game# games played# drawsDraw %
FIDE Chess (on game courier)3100%
FIDE Chess (on Brainking)5757324544.26%
Grand Chess1400%
Catapults of Troy8337.5%

In order to make sure this is an apples-to-apples comparison: I have included two other games from the same game server that the Catapults games were played on. I have also included statistics from a real-time server, BrainKing, since this server has a large number of games, and since you mentioned that correspondence games will have more draws.

I'm sure you won't do this, but if you ever change your mind and incorporate my ideas, you can still keep the same copyright on Catapults of Troy (then again, you can't copyright ideas, only artistic expression). :-p

- Sam

[1] Chess-like games can usually be made less drawish by adding Shogi drops to the game.