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Chess Variant Inventors. Find out which inventors have the most games listed here.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Kevin Pacey wrote on Mon, Nov 18, 2019 08:29 AM UTC:

Tonight I've been thinking about the rate of inventions I've produced so far that have anything substantially novel about them (ideally ground-breaking in some way). By my estimate only about 30% (9 of 32) of my CVP editorially approved inventions to date have anything about them I'd consider to be such. Oddly, of the games of mine most played on Game Courier to date, all have nothing much original about them, other than their recombining of piece types others have come up with, on square or rectangular boards of several sizes. I'm wondering how hard it is to come up with truly novel stuff that still seems to be of good design.

I went through many of the most productive CVP inventors games, as I found them with this CV Inventors page, and there seemed to be a very high rate of producing substantially novel games - sometimes a fair number of special rules were introduced, if little else. I only found one inventor thus far who seemed to produce a high rate of games that seemed to be not very novel ('leapers & sliders' on various sized boards might about sum it up), but one future CVP editor noted that this particular inventor seems to have generally given a lot of care to his game designing.

The main reason for my musings, though, is that I have 5 game invention ideas I'm currently thinking about, though they more or less all lack that special kind of novelty I've alluded to above. I hid diagrams of their tentative setups here and there already on CVP, mainly with quiet edits, for my future study, in case my current doubts about them turn to optimism, in some or all cases. Ideally I'd like them to be played lots over time, if they go on to have presets, but they may be worth saving in CVP database regardless.[edit: 22-Nov-2019: Currently I'm not liking any of my 5 game invention ideas, alluded to above, very much; 2 were depicted in my 'Diagram testing thread', and 3 were depicted in one of my comments to the game of Courier-Spiel.][edit2: 14-Dec-2019: Using edits, this day I've put 7 more CV ideas on CVP for me to study; 3 are depicted in one of my comments to my Frog Chess CV, 3 are depicted in one of my comments to my Parity Chess preset, and 1 is depicted in one of my comments to Amazon Grand Chess - and another 2 CV ideas were previously added to one of my comments to Courier-Spiel.][edit3: 15-Dec-2019: I'm now not much liking any of the CV ideas alluded to in my second edit, either.]