George Duke wrote on Tue, Jun 10, 2008 04:21 PM UTC:
Reasons justifying ratings and design philosophy that our camp can agree
with are expressed as well as anywhere by Tom Braunlich in David
Pritchard's 'ECV': ''Most designs are not marketable because
designers tend to underestimate the subtlety of what makes a good chess
variant. Two of the secrets of variant design are elegance and balance. An
elegant game combines minimum rules with maximum strategy. Chess itself is
a simple game to learn but its resulting strategy is profound. Any good
chess game should have similar elegance; its capacity should be a result
of the ramifications of the rules rather than the rules themselves. Many
inventors assume that making a game more complicated will make it better
but usually the opposite is true. The eternal challenges of regular chess
do not arise from its complexity but from the subtle balances of different
elements in the game. A good player has to do more than calculate
variations; he must know how to judge the relative value of many competing
strategic factors. .... When a designer changes the parameters of board
size, piece powers etc., the relative balance between the pieces quickly
changes and must be reconstitued in some way to prevent the game from
being too straightforward.'' (That is only 1/3 of what Pritchard quotes of
Braunlich under ''Designing a Variant'' 'ECV' 1994.)