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Games on Game Courier. A listing of Chess variants for Game Courier, ranked by number of times played.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
Kevin Pacey wrote on Sat, Nov 23, 2019 07:55 AM UTC:

Tonight I studied the list of well over 1300 games currently listed as possible to play on Game Courier, paying special attention to the ones most played. Of the top 107 games (currently those each with 14+ games finished), a little under half were ones I could have made a (non-rules enforcing) preset and/or CVP Diagram Designer diagram for by myself, with my presently limited abilities and study time, which I view as helping set my limitations (at the moment) for any CVs I might invent, to later in any way submit to CVP.

Other interesting things I found about the top 107 games listed included that only about 20 had what I'd call auxillary, or IMHO rather complex, rules out of the ordinary (that is, aside from how to simply move some fairly standard pieces), that one needed to know to play them. Also, my favourite 'meta-variant' as an inventor, because it seems it's not always very difficult to cook up a fairly acceptable example of one (basically 'leapers and sliders on a square or rectangular board'), made for about 20 CVs (within the top 107) that were IMHO 'truly popular' on GC. That is, the inventor was not almost always one of the players, who had issued an invitation, thus helping to promote his game; note these approx. 20 also were not CVP Recognized CVs, or in any way ground-breaking ones, but also the number of this meta-variant (in the top 107) would be considerably larger if I included games played heavily by the inventor in making this approximation.

Previously, I had noted that my favourite meta-variant comprised (at minimum) roughly 10% of the whole list of CVs currently available on Game Courier, as far as I could tell with a cursory inspection. Tonight I also surmised that I would have been able to make a non-rules enforcing preset and Diagram Designer diagram for (at minimum) 25% of the CVs played at least once on Game Courier to date (about 1100 CVs), with my present skill level - noting too that some games might e.g. require randomizing the game's setup, warranting a sort of rules-enforcing preset (I think).