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Ninety-one and a Half Trillion Falcon Chess Variants. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Jianying Ji wrote on Mon, Aug 14, 2006 09:19 PM UTC:

It is the lack of rules not their addition that increases the variety of
opening positions. A quick look at sit-tu-yin would suffice. Other than
pawns, the other pieces has no fixed starting points and can be placed
anywhere. I generally like chess variants that has free placements at the
start. Anything that obliterate openings while at the same time decrease
number of rules is alright by me.

This page seems to address something different entirely, that of number of
variants given a set of mutators, a term explicated and promoted by João
Pedro Neto. Each of the 'rules' is actually a mutator. It is no surprise
the number of variants one can create by stacking mutators together.

What is missing here is an over-riding theme. By theme I mean a organizing
principal, not the story that the variant tell. Without a theme to guide
the relationship of the mutators, we just have the mutators themselves,
which though interesting seem haphazardly grouped together.