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Game Courier Tournament #4: An Introductory Semi-Potluck. A tournament to feature games good for introducing people to Chess variants.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 4, 2009 08:53 AM EST:

I thought we were aiming only for modest variants here? This is why I proposed Knightmate, and the W-flyer seems a pretty interesting variant of this type. (The W-flyer might actually be stronger than a Rook, I suspect.) Different armies score much higher on the scale of exoticness, with many unorthodox pieces.

The circular Chess is actually not so strange as I first thought. The board s geometrically distorted in a way that will be very confusing to a Human player, but in fact it is topologically equivalent to a Möbius strip. Just connect the left and right edge of a 9x8 square board together after a twist. So it is probably much better to play it on a rectangular board, and keep in mind that there are moves over the edge that wrap around not in a cylinder, but in a Möbius way. That frees you of cumbersome mapping of fies and diagonals across the void, where in practice all action will be going on.