Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

'I would think that it would be the CVP's duty to include in-depth
coverage.'

The CVP is not a person and has no duties. Nor do those of us who maintain
this site have any duty to provide any coverage of this game. My objection
is to the notion of duty. We may have an interest in covering it. It might
be desirable to cover it. We may even have an editor who will be willing
and able to cover it. But it is not our duty to cover it.

Oh, and Jared, I hope you don't have any contrary opinions of your own.
Otherwise, I may have to authoritatively oppress them out of you.

I played a demo of this game at Origins in Columbus, OH this past weekend
and it's incredible! There have been many variants to standard chess in
recent years, but this one creates an entirely new GAME, with HUGE
strategic depth, that could definitely become a staple game if it's
promoted correctly. 

With 3 ways to win, it's definitely going to challenge chess enthusiasts
but is still fun for the casual player. Once you start playing this game,
it's possible that you might not want to ever play standard chess again.


I'm going to be analyzing this game until it comes out on August 14.

Michael,

Click on Jared's name for the antecedent.

Jared,

I think you need to work on improving your oppressed, anti-authoritarian
attitude, and you need to let people express opinions that are different
from yours without crying false alarms of oppression and authoritarianism.
There is no oppression or authoritarianism in expressing opinions and
giving reasons for them. I am a firm believer in the principles expressed
in John Stuart Mill's essay 'On Liberty'
(http://www.constitution.org/jsm/liberty.txt) I believe in both allowing
and exercising free speech for the sake of getting at the truth, and I
never tell someone to shut up just because I disagree with him. That would
be oppressive and authoritarian.

Um, can we please all voluntarily choose to limit our statements to
comments that apply to the item in question? Not a demand, just a
personal
request as a favor.

From the positive responses of Gary, Jared and others, I can see that
there will exist a demand to play this one by e-mail.

I had another idea. What if booster packs in a future expansion were to
come with collectable board sections? Some could have various
arrangements
of squares, some could have impassable squares, and so forth. Each player
could than bring his half of the board to the game.

That's why there need to be rules for team-building. Personally, when
playing this game I intend to ask my opponent to agree on teams of a
comparable strength level, or a handicap which I consider reasonable for
our skills. I would not agree to play until Maseitai had been chosen
which
would result in an interesting game.

Keep in mind I am not a purist. I like the appearance of the toys (yes,
they are toys and I will call them that) better than the minimalistic
abstract pieces or ugly computer icons typical of chess variants. These
are characters with personalities and stories, not geometric patterns.

Purists who enjoy the perfect determinism, perfect information, elegant
simplicity and predictable objective value systems to study in chess will
surely roll their eyes at the magical powers, because it throws these
factors into a cocked hat. I enjoy those factors as much as the next
chess
variant enthusiast, but I also find Navia Dratp's wild unpredictability
exciting. In collectable games, every season the company releases new
pieces that throw the existing game analysis out the window.

And let's not forget, one of the most important factors about a game is
finding somebody who's willing to play it with you. A collectable craze
will generate publicity for chess variants in general, where it is most
important, among the next generation in their formative years. That can
only result in benefit to this hobby.

[[I like the appearance of the toys (yes, they are toys and I will call
them that) better than the minimalistic abstract pieces or ugly computer
icons typical of chess variants.]]

Give me elegant abstract geometrics over garish toys every time.  I
strongly disagree that the graphics typical of chess variants, especially
many found on this site, are 'ugly'.

<[[I also find Navia Dratp's wild unpredictability exciting.]]

I find wild unpredictablity to be a bad thing for a strategy game.

[[A collectable craze will generate publicity for chess variants in
general, where it is most important, among the next generation in their
formative years. That can only result in benefit to this hobby.]]

I seriously doubt that the kids who take to the toyishness,
collectability, and wildness of Navia Dratp will ever be interested in
going 'back' to pure chess variants.

Sorry, but I just can't generate any enthusiasm for this game.

If Magic the Gathering could catch on, maybe this game has a chance. But
I'm going to remain skeptical until I see it catch on. Magic has some
marketing advantages in its favor. First of all, Magic the Gathering is a
really cool and meaningful name, whereas Navia Dratp is an ugly,
meaningless name. Now maybe it will catch on despite that. Yu-gi-oh! is a
stupid name, yet it has enjoyed some popularity. The other problem I see
with this game catching on is that collectible pieces are going to cost
much more than collectible cards. But, since I collected Star Wars action
figures as a kid, maybe that won't be that big a hurdle. However, I think
a Saturday morning cartoon show is what this game will need to really catch
on in popularity.

The piece shown in the photo is pretty, but it also looks like something
most little boys wouldn't be caught dead with. Little boys normally
prefer something more masculine than a cute little fairy. Including scary
monsters would probably make the game more appealing to that demographic.
And, considering that Chess variants seem much more popular among males
than females, for nearly everyone at this site is male, it's going to be
important to reach a male audience with this game.

As for pieces such as these vs. more abstract pieces, I am a strong
supporter of abstraction in piece design. For me, one of the things that
helps make a game more playable is being able to tell the difference
between different pieces at a glance. I can easily do this with a Staunton
set, with my own Abstract set, and with some of the more abstract sets
I've found in Chess programs (such as Futura in Checkmate! or Art Deco in
Chessmaster 6000). But when I've played Chess with humaniform figurine
pieces, or 3D images of such in a computerized Chess game, it has been
easier for me to confuse pieces.

An ugly, meaningless name was not a problem for Yu-Gi-Oh, an anime-themed
franchise which is wildly profitable and popular in both its card and
miniatures collectable forms. I myself and countless kids and adults I
know collect Wiz Kids click-dial miniatures which are just as expensive as
Navia Dratp, and it too is financially successful beyond any wildest
dreams. If you know anything about Japanese naming their products, just be
grateful it isn't worse. Japan has a beverage named 'Bacardi Sweat.'

I agree that ABC chess, Nova chess and Pick-a-Team chess are intrinsically
better games than ND. Vastly so. But by the standard of intrinsic objective
superiority, the Klingon language is inferior to the artificially
constructed language Lojban. But it's exponentially more widely spoken
than Lojban, because of Star Trek. This is the same kind of 'unfair'
reason that ND will be more popular than its superiors.

BUT... unlike many other Lojban supporters, I support Klingon just because
at least it exposes people to the hobby of artificial languages. I suggest
we take the same attitude here: at least ND is a chess variant. People who
Bandai markets to are unlikely to even find out about superior chess
without ND as a gateway drug. It can never in a million years take away
the fan base of people who would care about serious chess variants and add
them to the ranks of toy collectors. Think of it as taking a bit of the
gigantic target market of collectors and adding a few of them to the ranks
of chess variant enthusiasts.

Therefore for ND to be 'bad' or 'good' depends on what you want out of
it. The perfect chess, no. Good for our hobby, yes. You don't have to like
it or play it to be glad it's there.

When I was younger I fell for the 'collectible' game series.  I was into
Doomtrooper and Imajica cards.  I spent a lot of my hard-earned cash
attempting to 'collect' these entire series, buying boxes and boxes of
cards.

But these companies enjoyed torturing me, keeping my goal just beyond my
reach.  Doomtrooper increased its volume with the seemingly un-ending
introduction of expansion sets.  Imajica went out of print long before I
could even hope to obtain my goal.

I have shoe boxes filled with these cards, carefully filed and catalogued.
 Not being used or enjoyed, just taking up space in my closet.  And filled
primarily with un-godly numbers of the dreaded common cards.

Now I'm not saying that this game will have the same result.  I will just
be leery of investment into something that I cannot obtain in its entire.

Will the company offer the entire series as a set? or will they dole out
these 'pieces', forcing us to buy endless numbers of the same pieces in
order to obtain that one good piece.  If the latter, I have absolutely no
intention of even considering purchasing a single part of the game.

First of all, Magic the Gathering has caught on -- you just need to know
where to look for it.  I see MTG players all the time at our local
community college, as an example.

One of the things I keep seeing in this discussion is the lack, at
present, of team-building rules.  I would like to point out that most CCGs
have no such rules, except those like disallowing too many of one card in a
deck (and I would assume that this would eventually get a rule like that at
some point).  The reason for this is that there is a counterbalance to
power and usefulness, that counterbalance being the rarity (and
eventually, street cash value) of said cards.  (There is often another
counterbalance, too: the cost to utilize rarer and more powerful things. 
When playing Yu-Gi-Oh, for example, you can't play strong monster cards
without either sacrificing weaker ones or obtaining a bunch of cards to
'fuse' together.  This kind of counterbalance is already in Navia Dratp
in promotion powers.)

My two cents on the anthromorphic-style pieces, as opposed to abstract
stuff:  It's possible to create a set of pieces which are quite easy to
distinguish from each other.  Look at Battle Chess, for instance. 
Besides, I don't really see how you could get different pieces in Navia
Dratp easily confused, since they all have that little descriptive disc on
them.

Finally, I hope that this game doesn't get a Saturday morning cartoon (or
any other morning, for that matter) because when anything gets its own
cartoon, it turns into a game that most older players 'wouldn't be
caught dead with.'

It pertains to the discussion because he is trying to tell everyone who has
dismissed any part of it, since it isn't necessarily the entire ruleset of
a game which makes people dislike it -- sometimes a seemingly minor issue
can cause someone to dislike an otherwise good game.

I would like to know whether Matt Arnold is actually an inventor of this
game, as its entry states.  I know he did invent the four-handed
variation, but I thought that was pretty much it.