Comments by JianyingJi

Is fW roughly 2/3 of a pawn? Rough calculation shows it should be about a
pawn. On the other hand pawn is mobile, so fW's value should be
discounted somewhat. Any suggestions?

Welcome back everyone! This thread I'm creating for both site
administrators to explain the situation and to brainstorm solution. 
Course we all thank the people who keep this site up. And if we have ways to
solve this bandwidth issue, let us all pitch in whatever we can to help.

My first suggestion is that some sort mirror system could be setup so that
when the main site goes down, traffic get redirected to a different site.

Jeremy:

http://www.chessvariants.org/piececlopedia.dir/mimics.html

Is the page you are looking for. It covers all types of pieces that move
as other pieces, in various ways and circumstances. Though I do think you 
should keep your page up, because it offer a good jumping off point to your 
presets. A line of credit about mimics should suffice. Also your variants 
provides extensions to mimicing pieces not on original page. For example 
mixing mimes and mimickers.

It is the lack of rules not their addition that increases the variety of
opening positions. A quick look at sit-tu-yin would suffice. Other than
pawns, the other pieces has no fixed starting points and can be placed
anywhere. I generally like chess variants that has free placements at the
start. Anything that obliterate openings while at the same time decrease
number of rules is alright by me.

This page seems to address something different entirely, that of number of
variants given a set of mutators, a term explicated and promoted by João
Pedro Neto. Each of the 'rules' is actually a mutator. It is no surprise
the number of variants one can create by stacking mutators together.

What is missing here is an over-riding theme. By theme I mean a organizing
principal, not the story that the variant tell. Without a theme to guide
the relationship of the mutators, we just have the mutators themselves,
which though interesting seem haphazardly grouped together.

Clinton,

Prior art:

Tryslmaistan Chess, Chess for three, Klin Zha.

Triangle chess is nothing new, All three of these variants probably could
constitute prior art.

David:
    'shifting patches of sunlight scattered across a limitless dark plain'

I never imagined when I first submitted my rules that such a poetic description as David's existed. It is such an appropo description! It seems almost the essense of the game. There's certainly untapped depth to this game. 

Thanks so much to Joe and David's interest and conversation. It adds so much to the mystic of this game for me.

I agree, maybe someone with the skill and money can buy an initial run of
popular variant pieces and run a reverse auction to recoup the cost. the
details of course needs to be refined.

Good luck Jeremy, we await your return next year, and hope all things is
smoothed out this year.

At $2 to $3 I would buy about 16 pieces, that would be about a limit of
$50. I would probably be looking for half knight valued pieces, such as
ferz, wazir, alil, Dabbabah, Crab, Barc. Also a lion would not be bad, for
whatever kind of lion it would be.

Rich I think is more correct, this is an attempt to use catastrophe theory to chess. I'm not sure it succeed in anyway. Essentially the author is arguing  that if a move is bad if it crosses a fold in the 'evaluation surface', that  is the surface created by giving every square a value depending on its importance. The surface is then warped to show moves that would cause irreversible changes in evaluation. 

Missoum applies this to one move in one game which allows for the nice graphics he drew. However as a general theory I do not see how one would begin to create one. 

Personally some kind of quantum set theory or more classically combinatoric game theory is far more apt.

Good case studies in comparisons are Makruk, Shatar, and SitTuYin. Studying these variants closely one realizes they all probably started as 'fixes' to ur-chess, such as Chaturanga. For example Makruk and SitTuYin moved pawn up. Which is the most direct way to get to the middle game faster. SitTuYin is more radical of the two, with pawn moving up to practically the middle and deployment of pieces behind pawn line before game. In this way SitTuYin is like Fisher Random but far more radical. Makruk is more moderate, only moving the pawns forward one. Both Makruk and Shatar modifies winning conditions, which alters mating balance of pieces. SitTuYin outlaws stalemate, decreasing draws. 

Perhaps comparing draws in these games and chess, at highest levels of course, would be instructive in seeing whether their prescriptions work. This of course goes to an important point: without a diverse ecosystem of variants with sufficient number of high class players there is no way to determine empirically whether various proposals for such things as eliminating draws and instilling 'fighting spirit' really work.

Intellectual games does better in Germany, the low countries, and Asian
countries such as Korea, Japan, China. They do terrible in the US. The
only new abstract game to make headway here is Blockus. Look at the uptake
of GIPF games and the Korean game 'cafes'. Some German bars are stocked
with various abstract games. 

The key seems to be whether a game become a social past time. If games has
this social aspect then they will be played much more widely. Go and
Xiangqi in china was like that, and still is to a degree.

Theoretical considerations are not nonsense but must tempered by empirical experimentation. Below is my theoretical analysis of C vs A situation.

First let's take the following values:

R: 4.5
B: 3
N: 3

Now the bishop is a slider so should have greater value then knight, but it is color bound so it gets a penalty by decreasing its value by a third, which reduce it to that of the knight. 

When Bishop is combined with Knight, the piece is no longer color bound so the bishop component gets back to its full strength (4.5), which is rookish. As a result Archbishop and Chancellor become similar in value.

To avoid rehashing stuff, read following, especially the article list at
the end.

http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=4553

The question is how to incentive players to play for win in all
circumstances? After all, a draw in pursuit of a win is no shame, but to
not try at all is a letdown for all.

For variant creators the question is what kind of rules encourages players
to play for win?