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Derek Nalls raises a good point. It is important to create Chess variants for yourself, not just for the chess variant community. I once saw a documentary on the Looney Tunes cartoons, and one of the things I still remember is that the cartoonists said they made the cartoons for themselves. To this day, the old Looney Tunes cartoons remain classics, while many other cartoons made for a mass audience are best forgotten. An important thing to remember is that the most-played games are the ones actually played by their inventors. If you don't think enough of your games to play them yourself, you shouldn't seriously expect others to take up playing them.

The point on which I would disagree with Derek is on the need to create one perfect game. I believe in pursuing quality, which is achievable, but not in seeking after perfection, which is elusive and counterproductive to variety. I enjoy the variety of having different Chess variants. They provide room for different strategies and tactics, and I enjoy the freshness of trying out games I haven't played before.

I generally agree with Derek when he writes, “I respectfully caution all prolificists (whether they approve or disapprove of the term) to be mindful that unless they are successfully creating the very best, original chess variants in every class of games they publish, then definitively they are only contributing to a 'number pollution' of good games (presumably).”

But I do take some issue with what follows, “Furthermore, it is not possible to create a best chess variant in any class without a foundation and range of theory, experience and ingenuity to enable you to correctly see and surpass the limitations of all of the pre-existing, best games within that class.” Classes can be defined narrowly or broadly, and some games may fall into multiple classes. For example, should my game Hex Shogi 91 be considered a member of the Shogi class, the hexagonal class, or the Hexagonal Shogi class? If you define classes narrowly enough, many a new game might be considered in a class of its own. In that case, your new game would be the best in its class by default, and I would urge CV inventors to go beyond striving to make a game the best in its class to doing what they can to make it hard for anyone else to make a better game in its class. In other words, don't just try to do better than what has been done, try to do better than what might be done later.