Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

JJoyce for one has misapprehension about 'Mad Queen' and phrase 'Mad
Queen is Dead' repeated. He is in good company one supposes because it
had to be explained to FDuniho years ago. Italian 'Regina Rabiosa' (and
Spanish 'Reina Loca' we have also seen) was simply the Latin-area name
from the outset for the 64-square Chess following Shatranj. 'Regina
Rabiosa' does not refer to the Queen per se, but to the game. See
HJRMurray reference 'History of Chess' 1912. So, 'Mad Queen' is
synonymous with OrthoChess(DPritchard's favourite usage), FIDE Chess,
Orthodox Chess -- all the same. We left out the history lately because
Comments already covered it twice. Their revolution in the 1490's was to
bring on board 'Modern' Bishop, 'Modern' Queen, and Pawn two-step option. Much later in 1800's came more standardized Rules for Castling and En Passant. Even play of varying forms of this same 6-piece-type RNBQKP with Passar Bataglia or Italian free castling, we would tend to call Mad Queen Chess from its original name. Even FischerRandom we are inclined to call Mad Queen, being  basically the same ancient form. To drive home its antiquity, initiation of Regina Rabiosa, following Shatranj, goes back to before either Shakespeare or Pocahantas were born. [WShakespeare's 'The Tempest' with setting in Caribbean America has the famous scene of Ferdinand and Miranda playing Chess including her line 'O Brave New World that has such people in it', (over Chess)]

'What else is there?' The 'normal' modification made to chesspieces is
to add the knight move to them. The bishop and the rook are the usual
suspects, but the other 2 pieces, queen and knight itself, have also
rather often been modified in the same way, creating the Amazon and the
Nightrider. If I may, I'll call these the Q Stronger mod and the N
stronger mod.

I like the Amazon as a piece in the Maharajah and Sepoys or Tigerhunt
types of games, where the Amazon takes on [most of] the FIDE army, and
nowhere else that I can think of. If it can take on 15-16 piece FIDE
armies by itself with a fair chance of winning [until you get to rather
high-level play at least], then I submit it is too strong a piece. I'm
sure some will differ, but I'd love to hear those people explain away the
previous 2 sentences in this paragraph. 

George states 'the Queen is dead', or certainly should be. Since it's
~twice as powerful as the next most powerful piece, he may well have a
point. But I can live with the Queen, and for many people, it's their
favorite piece. But is there anyone who will defend modifying FIDE by
changing the Queen to an Amazon?

Okay, then, let's get on with the replacement. [And Mark, with my shatranj
variants, I'm obviously trying to re-write history to prevent FIDE from
ever evolving... ;-) ]

Where have we gotten to? The general thrust of the recent past [at least]
has been to modify a bit the bishop and rook by giving them a knight's,
lame knight's, or guard's move in addition to their slide - the
upgunning principle. For simplicity, I'd like to call the 3 similar
changes above the 'B-R Stronger' modification, whether it plays out on
an 8x8, 8x10, or 10x10. I think we can safely say that the B-R Stronger
mod, in whatever particular form, is the strongest candidate for 'The
Next Change', if only by virtue of it showing up over and over again to
the exclusion of almost everything else.

I admit to finding this rather uninteresting; for one thing, it's already
been done repeatedly, and I suspect both Gary and George's versions are
better than the standard one of Chancellor and Archbishop because they
don't push the mod to its practical limit like the standard. 

What else is there?

Card games, particularly poker, are doing quite well--mainly because players are more open to playing variants. There was a time when 5 card stud was the cool form of poker. These days it's Texas Hold-'em. It'll probably be another variant within 20 years.

I wish Chess did the same thing.

- Sam

Hey, Sam, my apologies. I believe I was the first to use the expression
'replace FIDE' here on this site.  It was an innocent use; I am [oddly]
neither a chessplayer nor a visitor to chess sites*, and had I known the
expression was inflamatory, I never would have used it. 

To anyone who has been offended, you have my sincere apologies. It was
never my intent to have more than a good theoretical discussion of where
chess could go. I do notice that no one here has taken the opportunity to
turn up the heat. And the discussion has been going on for a while. I
would think [and hope] that we can continue the discussion in the same
vein without anyone being offended by the phrase. Certainly this site of
any in the world is the place to discuss the topic in a [relatively - I
know us *here* too well to hope for anything better :-) ] calm and mature
manner. And I think a good percentage of the participants and readers of
this site either do or could enjoy the discussion. 

Joe

* I very infrequently visit Chessville, because a friend writes chess
fiction which shows up there occasionally; that's all I look for, that
friend's work.

I agree, Sam, about this 'replacing' talk. What I say is, if you want to
replace FIDE chess, why, go right ahead and replace it. There's no point
in just talking about it.

In terms of replacing Chess, I think Arimaa has the best chance, simply because it doesn't suffer from the 'My laptop can beat a grandmaster' problem that Chess has.

But, I don't think all Chess players will give up Chess tomorrow and start playing Arimaa day after tomorrow. It's more like, should Arimaa succeed, people will start to get turned on to Arimaa at a faster pace than Chess players will lost interest in Chess or die.

Once nice thing about Arimaa is that it's easy to make a variant on a Triangle, Rhombus, Hex, or any other strange board: Just define the place where the rabbits need to go, the places where each side sets up their pieces, the trap squares, and you're good to go.

- Sam

Back one day, to JJoyce's question, what would players most accept
for change keeping 8x8, I would say the Queen. Notice that everyone stays
in their Comments within pre-established philosophical zone we have heard
before. GGifford is the eternal apologist for FIDE OrthoChess as having
been perfected. Oppositely, we maintain consistently that mad Queen, your
Orthodox, is dead. Or, as the Judge said 100 years ago in sentencing
cannibal Alferd Packard to be hanged til he's 'dead, dead, dead'(he was
later commuted), Orthodox Chess is dead, dead, dead. Who wants to master
what Computers find the right move for in split seconds? Sure a million
zombies are still playing it, but Internet play in particular becomes morally corrupting in encouraging computer aid(cheating) and dissuading creative moves. Some mores, or social changes, go fast, others drag on at length: it took Christianity couple  hundreds of years to replace the religions of Nature, hearth, and usages that prevailed around the Mediterranean: actually FIDE-type mad-Queen has been steadily dying for 150 years already.  Precisely Computers are why FIDE replacements, whatever 2 or 20, evolving must continue to evolve(not synonymous with 'to progress'), to stay ahead of them.  100% agreement with JJoyce that their FIDE can increasingly be ignored for all the new forms and means emerging.

Joe, many thanks for pointing out Douglas Silfen's Iron Guard chess.  You
state the white queen is replaced by an invulnerable 1-space mover guard piece which can never be captured.  This serves as another excellent example of a piece that can be used on an 8x8 board (or other size) in creating a game which is close to Fide Chess.

Was going to go to bed after my last comment, but Gary beat me to the punch
again.

I don't think that I am in any way advocating less power on the
chessboard. What I am suggesting is a different distribution of the power.
I'm not shy about putting power pieces on a chessboard - look at the piece
values in Lemurian/Atlantean Barroom and see if you'd be willing to play
the FIDE/Grand  Chess pieces against them. Linear distance traveled is not
the only measure of power.

Douglas Silfen has just posted 'Iron Guard' chess, where the white queen
is replaced by an invulnerable [cannot be captured at all] guard piece.
What's the value of that piece that only moves 1 square per turn?

David, thanks for the references; I particularly enjoyed the piece value
discussions. [I read the Piecelopedia comments on the camel, also.] Legler
also increases power on the board by about 1/6, roughly. I suspect most of
us who care or think about this would agree that that's too much power
for a serious and subtle game. Bash, smash and crash is a different story;
many of us like a whole pile of high-powered pieces in a shoot-em-up style
game for fun, but I doubt many of us believe this is the way chess is
going in the future. 

George and Gary have proposed similar pieces, lesser versions of the BN
and RN. George has lamed the knight component, offering a rook-mao and a
bishop-moa [if I got the names right]. Gary has offered functionally all
but identical pieces, with the rook-ferz and the bishop-wazir. 

This 'seems' to be a trend. I think we have one answer to the way chess
is going. Chessplayers want to 'upgun'. Are there other realistic
possibilities, or do we all trade in our .38s for .45s and have done with
it?

David, thanks for the great references. Joe - in regard to cutting down
power - we are then heading back towards Shatranj... I doubt chess players
will like that.  Also, Ralph Betza made some power cutdown games, and I
made Heavy Gravity Chess a while back, which has things cutdown and is
related to Ralph's games of that genre.

Wow, in the time it took me to actually answer Mark, Gary and David have
gone past my comments. One of the thrills of being more or less a Mr. Mom
is the incessant distractions. Let's see if I can get this one done
before 6 more people supersede me.

Gary, I think you picked pieces that people like because they add a very
simple move to a power piece to make it even more powerful. Apparently
chessplayers, like soldiers, always want a little more firepower. These
pieces are easy to understand and very natural for chessplayers to use.
I've been thinking along your lines for a couple weeks, and I am
interested in looking at similar changes, but with a shortrange twist [of
course]. I've been considering replacing the rook and the bishop, but
with shorter ranged pieces that gain a leaping ability. I'd cut the range
of the R and B down to 4 squares. Then I'd add the alfil move, the 2
square diagonal jump, to the rook's move, and the dabbaba move, the 2
square orthogonal jump, to the bishop's move. All else as it is in FIDE
[now and forever, amen???], but the rook is an AR4 [sounds like a weapon]
in Betza notation, and the bishop is a B4D. These pieces are not quite as
intuitive as yours, and the queen piece is more problematical. On a larger
board, I'd probably make the Q the combo new piece, a Q4AD. On an 8x8,
I'm less inclined to let the queen jump. And this is running long - more
later

Hey, Mark, this is my local chess club. I, um, don't, ah, actually play
that, uh, game. FIDE, that is. I stopped playing FIDE around 35 years ago,
and didn't play any sort of chess at all until I got online and found this
site about 3 years ago. I played for about 10 years, basically in the
1960's, between ages 10 and 20, and then switched to wargames. This
undoubtedly helps explain some of my more, mmm, unusual designs. 

I do agree with what you said, except that I think 10% interest among
'Chess' players is probably too high, unless it's Bughouse or 5-minute
chess, which the people who teach chess seem to find useful in sharpening
their student's skills. But only as practice, warm-up excercises. I do
think people on the internet will find a range of games to play, and that
at some point in the future [far future, most likely - not less than 50
years, anyway], FIDE will be only one of the games played in world chess
championship tournaments. 

Now, if that is the case, what other games will they be playing? [Sure, it
*could* be anything, but some games are more likely than others...]

See Legler's Chess or Neo-Chess for a game which enjoyed a modest popularity in the 1920s. But I fear that success for chess variant inventors today will be measured in thousands, not millions, of players.

See Chess on a 12 by 12 board for a different kind of game. Now that the internet gives us free access to custom virtual boards, more people should be willing to try out chess variants that use the familiar 32 pieces. As computer monitors increase in size, I can even imagine something like the 6x6x6 variant I outlined in this 3D Chess thread catching on. Especially if each army is limited to 32 pieces that (mostly) come from two standard chess sets.

Interesting comments from Mark and Joe and David.  This morning, after reading Joe's 'FIDE piece' comment I submitted a candidate for a future Fide Chess replacement.  It uses an 8x8 board.  And, the Rooks and Bishops have been replaced  with two non-Fide pieces [Dragon Horse and Dragon King (2promoted Shogi pieces)] such that the Rooks can now move one space
diagonally (or their normal move) and the Bishops can do an orthogonal
move or their normal move.  At my chess club (which terminated in 2005)
many players were quick to accept Shogi in full form... so we know Fide
players can easily handle the two non-Fide pieces from Shogi.  Will this
new game catch on?  I doubt it.  The reason is that Fide Chess is pretty
much excellent as it is.  Also, the serious players have spent a lot of
time on book openings, studying with computers, etc.  I only created this
new game to show we can have a very very chess-like game on an 8x8 board
and replace a few Fide pieces.  Of course, it wipes out existing Chess
Openings.  Fischer Random Chess does that too.  And so will any variants
we come up with...  I don't think we are going to come up with the next
Fide chess.  I could be wrong...  but, that is just my opinion.  Still,
long ago there were some Shatranj players who thought their game would
never be replaced.  Best regards to all.

'what conceivable chess piece the millions of serious FIDE players would
accept as a replacement'

If you're seriously asking this, I'd suggest you drop by your local
chess club and find out. Conduct an informal survey. But I predict you'll
be disappointed if you expect more than 10% of them to consent to any
change to FIDE whatsoever, even to play as an amusing variant, and even
those wouldn't want to hear talk about a 'replacement' for FIDE.

I think the next evolution of chess, if it's to have one, will have to
attract players mostly from people who aren't serious FIDE players.

Gentlemen, my comments in this particular subject were/are directed at a
hypothetical replacement for FIDE, one that could conceivably actually
occur. Now, I think Lemurian Shatranj, for example, is a fine game, and
played on an 8x8; but I think that when most people find the king is the
only piece they recognize or have a clue how to use, and that I slowed
down the pawns too, it's unlikely they'll make LemS the next FIDE. 

David and Gary, both of you are fine chess players, and you participate in
chess tournaments [and do pretty well, I might add]. My question is what
conceivable chess piece the millions of serious FIDE players would accept
as a replacement on an 8x8 board for which current piece, R, N, B, or Q? 

I suspect that current trends in society and technology are just beginning
to make their impact on chess, and that things will change remarkably over
the next several decades in FIDE. [My personal suspicion is that the FIDE
organization will attempt to basically freeze changes, and will be
overtaken by large groups of people on the internet who will do things
their own ways, leaving FIDE less relevant.]

My ideas for 8x8 boards mostly use Shatranj pawn movement rules, see Midgard Chess for an example. For a change, I made the total piece strength closer to FIDE Chess than Shatranj.

Joe, you write, in part: '... on an 8x8, could the pieces really change?'
Then go on to say, 'I suspect it's unlikely.'  

But I see no justification for that concept.  We have many CV 8x8 boards
that have changed pieces.  I see it as only 'unlikely' if designers
throw out the possibility.  I don't think they should.  Take care.

We can't know how chess is going to evolve, but we can do a little
thinking on where it could go. Capablanca and Fisher seem to have set the
stage for the current debate. On 8x8 boards, FRC and similar variants seem
to have it all tied up. Really, with the same pieces, there is a limit to
what you could do. I suppose there is a slight possibility the pawn could
be tinkered with, but, on an 8x8, could the pieces really change? I
suspect it's unlikely.
On the larger boards, the new pieces of choice have all pretty much been
the standard trio, namely the long-range sliders with the knight move
added. This has the virtue of being instantly recognizable to the typical
chess player, and gives that player some more power pieces to play around
with. But I lean toward George's point of view [unsurprisingly, given my
design history] that the game then suffers from too much power, especially
as the power pieces can now leap as well as slide indefinitely. The idea of
eliminating the leap by using moa and mao [non-leaping knights] as the
additives does reduce that power a bit. But I'd like to examine some
other possibilities. One possibility that might be interesting [though
just as an experiment, it's unlikely mesing with the knight will catch
on] is to replace the knights in Falcon Chess with the bent Hero, which
does include all the knight's moves as a subset of its move.

Perhaps the best games aren't invented; maybe they just evolve.