Single Comment

2007-2008 Chess Variants Design Contest. Chess variant inventors gather round! We're doing it again! Exact nature of contest to be determined with YOUR help!![All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Joe Joyce wrote on Sat, Sep 1, 2007 05:01 PM UTC:

Ah, Jeremy, I was away when the time was extended. Now I have a chance to expand a bit on the contest idea.
Gary, great to have you back. Been agreeing with everyone, got nobody to argue with, so thanks! ;-) Great line you posted!
'With enough constraints, a design no longer is a design, but a mandate.'
My counterargument could be that without constraints, there is no design, only chaos, but instead I'll just lay out boundaries to the idea, and we'll see if they're tight enough to give all the designs a coherent theme, but loose enough to prevent everyone from being forced to design the same game [like we don't design the same games over and over again without anyone forcing us to... :-) ] 
The contest is to design a sufficiently chesslike variant that it could be 'the next FIDE chess'. Examples of reasonable contenders in this category would be Fisher Random, Carrera/Capablanca Random, Grand Chess and Falcon Chess; shogi, shatranj, large variants, multi-movers and such are not.
Specific constraints that could be decided: 
* board size - 8x8, 8x10 and 10x10, or only 10x10? 
* must all the FIDE pieces be maintained totally intact? 
* is there a minimum and maximum number of pieces? Of pawns?
I think this would provide a reasonable balance between freedom and constraint.