Enter Your Reply

Ok, here are daily comments on what has been written so far from my last
posting:
1. How effective of a recruiting tool into the world of chess variants are
home made sets?  If someone who plays a game, and likes it somewhat, what
are the odds they will end up continue to play and promote it, if they had
to go and make their own set?  Sure, from a totally dead end activity where
you are the only person who they may play, it is ok, but for promoting the
growth of chess variants, how well does it work?  Let's say someone has
you try a cardgame, and you like it, and then they tell you you need to
make your own cards to play it.  Will you do that?
2. Is anyone else here not confused by those SuperChess pieces?  I look a
them, and I have difficulty remembering which set of pieces is which.  I
commend the effort, but the pieces leave me confused.
3. Hmm... GREAT, there is another factor that wasn't even on my mind
until now.  How and the heck is the chess variant community going to
happen to be able to do notation for games in a way that everyone can
understand?  I believe algerbraic notation is helpful for recording moves,
but board positions?  What do we do then?  I know this will be important
down the road for IAGO, if it is going to be covering a range of chess
variants as part of the IAGO World Tour.
4. Ok, the name of the pieces (what they are as initials, also has me
confused here).  I have to see yet another set of names for games that
Capablanca used and tried to popularize?  Again, my reference at standards
points a bit at this.  If you go by a hard and fast rule that everyone
creates their own games in isolation from one another, you end up with 40+
different names for he same piece.  And actually the same name used with 5+
different pieces.  Yes, you get cool artistic expression, but how is it on
the community?  When I was doing IAGO chess, should of stuck with
'Templar' for the Knight+Bishop piece, and 'Champion' for the
Knight+Rook piece, because my artistic expression demands I do it?  How
helpful is it to the community.  I am not forbidding anyone from doing
this, but asking how reasonable is it to have this as a hardcore rule?
5. On the issue of pawn promotion, unless the chess variant community is
going to abandon completely having physical pieces (not sure how one gets
growth without then though), exactly how does one handle pawn promotion in
games where you can have a piece promote to multiple versions of Queen
power pieces.  Like take a Capablanca Chess game, and you want to get a
second Chancellor or Archbishop into play.  How is this handled?  Are we
going to permanently adapt a flipped chess rook as a 'Joker' piece that
a pawn can promote to, and the Joker can represent anything?  Are we going
to codify flipped rooks as a new piece, or demand people making chess
variants provide enough physical equipment to handle every case of pawn
promotion, or do we give up on the idea of having physical equipment
completely?  We set up a nice place for all traces of chess variants to
disappear if the Internet and all computers ever blew up with do that, by
the way.
6. If you want things to remain exactly as they are, with each game being
seen as unique creations and islands to themselves, then you don't need
to consider standardization.  You don't even need to consider any game a
'chess variant'.  It is just a game.  So, the CV site could also then
break out checkers and Go to, and play those (there are presets on here),
because heck, everyone just plays games.  There is no such thing as
'Chess Variants', just games.  I will say this is unworkable from an
IAGO perspective though, which also needs to categorize abstract strategy
games.
7. One project I am looking at is a protocol system so websites that play
games can communicate their games with IAGO.  Having it handle a wide
range of abstract strategy games, would be of big help here.  I would lead
he way for people to get rated across a categories of games or abstract
strategy games in general. The SuperDuperGames site does this.