Single Comment

George, have you ever watched Star Trek? The original, with William
Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley? The 3 main characters, Kirk,
Spock, and Bones, are an unusual trio to be running a starship, if you
consider their individual personalities, how they each act and react. But
if you look at the situation from a larger perspective, you see that the
three represent the three main facets of human personality: will,
intellect, and emotion. When they function properly together, they are one
complete person, and capable of properly commanding the Enterprise.

The CVPages is a group of people with varying beliefs, abilities, and
styles. I, for one, am deeply appreciative of your grasp of the history of
chess and chess variants. While the TV show Star Trek is, at its best,
allegory, it does portray an organization as functioning like an
individual when the organization is at its best. And it leads one to
speculate on such organization as there is at CV. Lol, I design a lot more
games that you, George, but you sure write more than I do. I guess you'd
characterize me as the random thoughts [maybe even nightmares] up in the
head; and I'd characterize you as the  historian. :-) 

But those characterizations are incorrect, or at least incomplete; I, for
example, am cast in the role of spokesman for the multitude. And George,
this makes you defender of the orthodox. Surely these last 2
tongue-in-cheek characterizations are a lot closer to what we'd like to
believe, anyhow. Now to get to chess variants, the ostensible purpose of
this site, it appears that you will accept boards up to 16x16 for 'the
other track'. But for 'the next chess', 80ish squares is about maximum,
being some 25% larger than 8x8, halfway between that and your 50% is way
too much. This gives us 8x10, 9x9... 7x11, an interesting size for 1-step
pawns games, maybe, but not a shape all that comfortable for western
players, so that ends the available 80ish boards, and leaves 8x9 as the
only remaining possible board size between 8x8 and 80 squares. Will
orthochess players use any of those board sizes?