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Sky. Brilliant original game by Christine Bagley-Jones. Pieces promote through a succession of odd leapers eventually to a rooks.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Charles Gilman wrote on Wed, Jan 26, 2011 07:37 AM UTC:
Well that would be a dangerous precedent. Caliph, Empress, Ibis, Kangaroo, and Princess are all names with one use in Man and Beast and another for problematists. All the Man and Beast uses now appear in variants - mostly in mine but note Timothy Newton's Outback Chess. The first three appear in my Armies of Faith series, all based on the names that they use. What should I do with that lot, change the names or the pieces? If I keep the pieces with new names they won't fit the theme. If I keep the names but as the problematists use them they won't relate to the rest of the pieces properly - and they'll clash with my use of the same pieces under their MAB names elsewhere. AOF 5 already uses the piece that problmatists call Empress, the Marshal.

The simple truth is, variant designers rejected problematist names long before I joined these pages, and problematists rejected names from variants still earlier. The problematists had their chance when naming the Rook+Knight and Bishop+Knight compounds. They had a lot to choose from if they could be bothered to research them, but they just came up with new ones. It was in search of 'the' standard set of names (esp. for 3d pieces as it happened) that I found these pages. Had a consensus built up over both communities I would have been the first to go along with it but none had. From what little I've seen of problematists on these pages I get the impression that we don't even featuire on their radar. Why should we stick up for their usages when they've never stuck up for ours? Sorry for all the passion, but it really is too late to do anything about it.