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Hello Rich,

I was not stating my own preferences for what should go into a Next Chess.
I was making predictions on what it would take for something to become a
Next Chess. Moreover, I have strong doubts that a Next Chess will ever
rise to prominence in the near future. You speak of Next Chess being an
evolutionary change to Chess. Many evolutionists are uniformitarians, who
believe that evolutionary change happens gradually. I'm an evolutionist
but not a uniformitarian. I think catastrophic evolution, as argued for by
Velikovsky, is more likely. On this view, evolution happens primarily after
extinction events, which leaves niches for new species to evolve into. For
example, other animals are not evolving to become as intelligent as
humans, because we dominate that niche, but if the human race died out,
another species would become more likely to evolve intelligence like ours.
With regard to Chess, Chess has carved out a niche for itself that, by its
occupation of its niche, makes it extremely hard for any other game to
fill the same niche. I applaud any work you're doing toward testing and
promoting quality Chess variants, but I think it would take an extinction
event to knock Chess out of its niche and prepare the way for a Next
Chess. Basically, if civilization collapsed to the point where most people
forgot Chess, perhaps from nuclear war or the 'coming global superstorm'
or something, then there would be room for a successor to make way. Of
course, as much as I would be thrilled to see my own game of Eurasian
Chess, which George Duke has mentioned as one of his top three picks for a
successor, approach the popularity of Chess, I think the collapse of
civilization would be too high a price to pay for that. The best way short
of this is for an organization to promote some variant in much the same way
that FIDE promotes Chess. I have serious doubts this would succeed, but I
do think its the best shot at a Next Chess short of waiting for the
collapse of civilization to kill off Chess.