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Glenn Nicholls wrote on Thu, Dec 20, 2007 09:05 PM UTC:
A reply to Charles Gilman & George Duke:  Thanks for the comments which have proved helpful and I can see why words such as satire and theme heavy came about.  Obviously nobody wants their page to be awkward to read but there is a reason why the game was written in this manner – let me explain.  There are a number of popular novels which feature within them the playing of chess, a chess variation or a complex board game; they are generally science fiction or fantasy and range from the Dune novels to the Harry Potter books.  Broadly speaking we therefore have in these novels the playing of a war game within a war story.  What I have attempted to do with the game of Dragon is, of sorts, to reverse this by having the story within the game such that the playing of the game enacts out the situation as described by the outline story.  In order to do this it is necessary to bring the pieces and the board to life and the so the pieces must be given characters and sufficient descriptions and the board must be given sufficient terrain details and they need to look realistic and be on a large board – standard Staunton pieces or symbolic Chinese Chess discs have to be forgotten here as does the size of and form of their standard boards.  These additions to the game, of course, substantially increase the length of the page and may at times cause the reading of the rules to be harder.
Probably the easiest way to learn the game is to start with the naval chess side of the game; once the ideas of embarking, passage, boarding, sinking and disembarking are grasped the rest of the game falls into place much easier.
The presentation of the game does not have an obvious order, arrangement or format (that I can see) which gives the best way of learning together with all the rules, prelude and details fitted alongside in a tidy way.  I am sure anybody with good writing and presentation skills could present the game in a much better and more readable way than I can, but for the time being  I will have to give this some more thought.

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