Single Comment

An 'Excellent' to the editor!

Several excellent people have also given excellent ratings for my game, for
which I thank.

It is common for the neophyte chess variant author to invent his first game
and tout it as the inevitable replacement for Chess. We all laugh at
this.

It is uncommon for somebody who has authored thousands of highly-regarded
chess variants to refer to one of his inventions as the most likely
evolutionary future of the game of Chess. I hope we all take this
seriously.

I do not expect that CwDA will become widely played, much less overtake
FIDE Chess, within my lifetime; nor do I expect that when it does the same
primitive armies that I designed will be used. However!

However, it was 1976 when I first conceived of the game, and 1996 when I
composed the first succcessful army (Colorbound Clobberers). Twenty years.
My first attempts were so bad; and I realized that in order to creat this
game I needed to explore the problem of the values of chess pieces. And so
I did.

Twenty years. A large part of one's life. Don't imagine that I thought
about the problem every day of every year, no, that's not how it went at
all! I worked on it, and I gave up in bafflement, and I came back to it
after a few years of not thinking about it, and then I gave up and came
back and tried again and gave up and came back and tried again and so on.
Not so much brilliant as really stuborn.

Remember that I am a genuinely certified master of FIDE Chess: I know and
love the openings, endgames, midgames. Chess with Different Armies has
satisfied my expectations of what Chess should be -- it has openings,
endgames, midgames, all with the general feel of real serious FIDE Chess,
but of course it's different. Someday, the Grandmasters will begin to play
my game, and because they are so strong they will find imbalances in the
particulat armies I designed -- and I don't care, because once they start,
they're hooked. Meanwhile, nobody can design any chess variant without at
least thinking about different armies! I am pleased to see this, because I
had expcted that my mind's greatest invention would not be recognized so
soon; and yet I always hope for more. Chess with Different Armies (together
with the essential work on piece values) is, I think, a really
revolutionary idea even though my own work on these subjects is so
hopelessly bad (I look good now, but when real mathematicians take a run at
the val
use and real Grandmasters start to evaluate my armies, watch out!) What an
accomplishemnt, and did you know that with that accomplishment I only need
a buck fifty to ride the subway?