Check out Grant Acedrex, our featured variant for April, 2024.

Enter Your Reply

The Comment You're Replying To
Jeremy Lennert wrote on Fri, Nov 2, 2012 10:51 PM UTC:
You have failed to define the term "piece", which seems to be pretty
important.  Under your proposed definitions, I think one could make a
reasonable argument that StarCraft or baseball are "board games" (in that
they are entertainments with rules and goals that contain things that could
reasonably be described as "pieces" that move among a predefined set of
possible "locations"), which is probably not what you intended.  Your
definition of "battle game" also seems very overbroad; it includes many
games that most people would say have nothing to do with "battle", such
as Klondike (card solitaire), Pandemic, etc.

You've defined "piece type" as "a group of pieces that are identical to
each other".  That definition seems to imply that it is a set of specific
pieces, whereas I think most people think of a "piece type" as a
taxonomical grouping.  Furthermore, your definition seems to imply that
pieces owned by different players are never the same type, which I think
also conflicts with common usage.

Your count of "over 2,000 documented board games", while technically
accurate, is far short of the true number.  BoardGameGeek's game database
currently contains 61,611 board games, and if your definition of "unique
game" is generous enough to include all the variants on chessvariants.org,
then I'd wager the true number is at least 100 times that.

You say that "at some point everyone will need to pick a game to play." 
If you mean that everyone will need to agree on one game to be the only
game ever played by any person ever again, I think the idea that this is
necessary, desirable, or even feasible is extremely naive.  Conversely, if
you only mean that a single person typically will not want to play 2,000
games SIMULTANEOUSLY, and therefore any specific individual will need to
settle on one game to play on any given lunch break, then the segue to
talking about the "best game" seems unjustified.

Furthermore, your suggested criteria of "originality" seems to directly
undermine the concept that such a thing as a "best game" is possible,
since it implies a yearning for novelty.  No single game will remain novel
forever.

Edit Form
Conduct Guidelines
This is a Chess variants website, not a general forum.
Please limit your comments to Chess variants or the operation of this site.
Keep this website a safe space for Chess variant hobbyists of all stripes.
Because we want people to feel comfortable here no matter what their political or religious beliefs might be, we ask you to avoid discussing politics, religion, or other controversial subjects here. No matter how passionately you feel about any of these subjects, just take it someplace else.
Quick Markdown Guide

By default, new comments may be entered as Markdown, simple markup syntax designed to be readable and not look like markup. Comments stored as Markdown will be converted to HTML by Parsedown before displaying them. This follows the Github Flavored Markdown Spec with support for Markdown Extra. For a good overview of Markdown in general, check out the Markdown Guide. Here is a quick comparison of some commonly used Markdown with the rendered result:

Top level header: <H1>

Block quote

Second paragraph in block quote

First Paragraph of response. Italics, bold, and bold italics.

Second Paragraph after blank line. Here is some HTML code mixed in with the Markdown, and here is the same <U>HTML code</U> enclosed by backticks.

Secondary Header: <H2>

  • Unordered list item
  • Second unordered list item
  • New unordered list
    • Nested list item

Third Level header <H3>

  1. An ordered list item.
  2. A second ordered list item with the same number.
  3. A third ordered list item.
Here is some preformatted text.
  This line begins with some indentation.
    This begins with even more indentation.
And this line has no indentation.

Alt text for a graphic image

A definition list
A list of terms, each with one or more definitions following it.
An HTML construct using the tags <DL>, <DT> and <DD>.
A term
Its definition after a colon.
A second definition.
A third definition.
Another term following a blank line
The definition of that term.