Comments by GlennNicholls

To F.D.

Thank-you for your response.

Yes, of course this good site can determine its own definition of what is a Chess-variant and what is not, but then numbers of players of Chinese Chess might disagree that the Game is but a variant of.....what?.....what game on the site is not some sort of Chess-variant.....Western Chess it seems.  Can you let me know please what game is the Cornerstone of Chess on the site such that variants are determined to be so, or are there several, or many.

On Games - I suppose the popularity of Chinese Chess raises the question of whether it is really a variant at all and not simply a major Game in its own right, like Western Chess.

On Pieces - the somewhat popularity and awareness of the Capablanca pieces, and possibly other "variant" pieces, may hopefully perhaps eventually reach a level nearer to those of the well known Chess pieces e.g. the Western Chess Queen, Rook, Knight etc., but this, I think, is unfortunately a long way off.

I'm still curious - are the board and pieces of Xiang Qi (Chinese Chess) going to permanently stay as an image on the home page, or will this revolve with images of the other mentioned games such as Chess, Shogi etc.  I hasten to add that I don't mind some of the things as they currently are (or recently were) and I am still quite happy for others to eventually decide on these things.

I'm not too bothered on this point - as you say a logo is not a map, and yet.....although I live in the UK and my individual perspective of East-West is different in any case, so far as I know the arbritary deciding of East-West is by the Prime Meridian and this passes through the UK and perhaps this should over-ride other considerations.

I'm not too bothered on this point - as you say a logo is not a map, and yet.....although I live in the UK and my individual perspective of East-West is different in any case, so far as I know the arbritary deciding of East-West is by the Prime Meridian and this passes through the UK and perhaps this should over-ride other considerations.

I'm curious - are you happy representationally with the East-West positioning of the images in the top left logo?

I'm quite happy to let others decide on a new logo, But, I hope there is something of Chinese Chess in this - there seems to be a Cannon and Elephant at the moment.....most interestingly the website Ancient Chess.com states that this game is probably played by more people than any other board game in the world, including Western Chess (though I would think probably not played so geographically as widespread as Western Chess) - those of us, or some, of the Chess Variants site might want to keep this in mind.

To H.G.M.

Yes, it all depends, Chess-variant (capital C small v) might be used as in Chess-variant pages, this looks neat, I think, when the subject is used in writing about, but may not be striking enough as a Site Heading where a Person's eye wants to be drawn towards.....writing is somewhat like music, at least for me, and for example my own punctuation of five dots (.....) I use as a "drift" (this generally denotes slow movement) to a linked sentence, or even a linked paragraph, rather than a full stop (. I generally use to denote stop and start, or stop).

The recent comments regarding hyphenation of words and English Grammar are interesting.  I think these days there is scope for some subjectivity in the use of Grammar and Punctuation and I have in fact used some subjectivity in my pages here, e.g. my page and game of TigerChess is one word.....also in my first name(s) of Shaye-Alexander the hyphen does not actually denote only a single joined name but two possible stand-alone first names as well.  In this comment I have deliberately used subjective punctuation and so forth.  However, I think the term Chess Variants is best put as two seperate words for a Site Heading and used with capitals, though the capitals may not always be "correct" when writing about.  An alternative might be Chess-variants (capital C, small v) to emphasize that Chess is the primary noun of a joint description, if this is required - but 100% theoretically correct written English would require the attention of a Professor or expert in such, I would think.

The Eagle's move (is this the Griffon's move?) could be reversed here so that instead a Rook's single move is then followed by a Bishop's unrestricted slide - I did use similar pieces in my game of Citadel, but I kept both Rook and Bishop unrestricted slides in both pieces ( I called them Tiger-riders); they seemed about as strong as the Chess Queen - I had the original idea from the Giraffe of Tamerlane Chess and based Citadel very loosly on this Game.

Sometimes I think it is more important to consider the Plausibility of a piece before other factors.....There is in this page, at the end and with a move diagram, a modified Character (piece) called the (Northern or Sumatran) Tiger-emperor and he is a little bit more powerful than the Character called the (Northern or Sumatran) Tiger-prince that he is a modification of.....But, he is not quite so logical in his moves as the Prince and so I have not included him in any Games here - the Prince appears in the Games of Tiger-strike and Tiger-crossfire.....I think the Emperor is Plausible enough in his moves though, and I think Plausibility needs to be considered with the moving and capturing abilities of Chess Characters, or the Game and its Background and Representational aspects can lose sense - this is of course only my personal opinion.....The Emperor combines the moves of just two Chess pieces i.e. the Rook and Knight.....despite this, he seems to be fractionally more powerful than the well known three-piece compound of Rook, Bishop and Knight (usually called a General, or Amazon or other name).

Thanks Fergus.....I think the WYSIWYG mode might sort it out - I'll try it later on.

Whatever I do the spacing on the text always comes out as one line on this Page - does anyone know why - I would be very obliged for any advice or help on this.

Thanks Fergus, its working now.

I don't seem to be able to upload images....they are just the usual JPG images and are under 100k - does anyone know why this is?

I can only speak for my own Games on this site here, but this may well apply to some of the thousands? of other variants, and that is, although I have done some testing, I cannot guarantee that every Game I have on this site would "work".....they all seem Plausible, but Plausible is the word, and in any case no Money has been paid me (and none are for sale at all anyway) and so I owe no duty that the Games do in fact "work". BUT they MAY be good.

10 x 10 Variants are IMHO hard indeed to invent, even Capablanca settled on a 10 x 8.

Thanks for the reply.  I'll give this a try, but its late here in the UK, so tomorrow maybe, or when there's time.

I don't think this page should have been messed up like it has been.  Changes should not just be made that do this.  What great purpose has been served by the change anyway.  Posting in Word was at least straightforward and it worked and was simple.  I think someone should put things back to how they were.  There are in fact a series of Games on this page, and not merely one, and they often link together, and there are other items connected with Chess and Chess variants that some may find interesting, items that are somewhat of novelty value.