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Ninety-one and a Half Trillion Falcon Chess Variants. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Sep 13, 2007 12:22 AM UTC:
It's true that it's easy to offer a write-up of a game or games that can easily be permuted to produce 'zillions' of games. My 4th post, Two Large Shatranj Variants, is the biggest lie I've ever told. There are 2 board sizes, an 8x10 and a 10x10, and I offer a range of possibilities that extends into the zillions, with alternate pieces for each type of piece, alternate placements of pieces in the standard setups, a number of different promotion rules, and, with Atlantean Barroom, a new approach to 10x10 board setups that produced a new setup for Paulovit's 10x10 game. From that I've drawn 3 games, Great, Grand, and Barroom Shatranj. I think most of the other games would be poor, with an inappropriate mix of pieces. I consider 'Too Large' a game system, not a game, with a total of 3 current games [+ 2 variants using rooks] as its representatives. Only 3. Not zillions.

As far as Gary's game, with the RF and the BW, well, even though I am not a fan of the approach of making FIDE more powerful by adding shortrange moves to infinite sliders, it is obvious that I am in a very small minority. The chess world obviously prefers augmenting the current power pieces somewhat to actually replacing any of the current pieces. That being the case, there are only 3 good solutions currently that I've seen: Gary's, adding the 'sidestep' to the B&R; yours, adding the moa and mao to the B&R; and Carrera's, adding the N to the B&R. Only 3. [And not excellent, but that's me.]

[EDIT] When I posted this, I saw George had made another comment. Okay, I'd like more of a write-up from Gary, too, but it's been my experience that people don't like all that written stuff getting in the way of the game. I got complaints about my verbosity, and suggestions were made that any little stories I might want to add could be put in the back where they're very easily ignored. After Too Large and Atlantean Barroom, what do you think I'd wanted to write for Lemurian Shatranj? Look at the page: it's a bare-bones minimal piece and rules description with no background or flavor aside from the name, which is effectively meaningless without the background.