💡📝Adrian King wrote on Sun, Jun 28, 2015 04:13 PM UTC:
One answer to the charge of unnecessary complexity in Jupiter is that complexity was the point: I was trying to see just how much I could fit into one game, while still making it feel something like chess.
Another answer is that I wanted to see how the various move geometries and abilities interact. What makes a piece with unconventional abilities more or less valuable? How much does its value depend on its location relative to other pieces on the board, or on the unconventional abilities of those other pieces? To answer questions like these, perhaps the complexity is necessary after all.
Because I've never gotten a computer to play Jupiter, I haven't yet figured out the answer for this particular set of pieces. But Typhoon, which is basically a subset of Jupiter, is a lot of fun.