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Okay, Gary, I stand chastened. 'Scum of the Earth reporting for
barnacle-scraping duty.' I meant no offense in relating what most 19th
century men thought about the general abilities and capacities of women
and children, conveyed in the form of a game deliberately dumbed down to
allow for their 'innate inferiority'. And I included computers in that
disadvantaged group with Los Alamos chess - a 6x6 game dumbed down for the
early computers. I was implicitly contrasting statements from the past with
what we know now. I don't think I could beat today's computers, either.
You wouldn't need a Deep Blue to beat me, a shallow HAL would be more
than adequate. ;-)
Your note made my morning. I'll try to be better, but I'm not a serious
person, so I may slip. I am, however, a serious designer - you know I'd
love to design games professionally, but it's a killer field to break
into with no computer skills. So I enjoy what I do and maybe some day,
I'll get lucky. In the meantime, I have a deep interest in the theory and
practice of game design. And this topic of big board CV's, while I
undoubtedly will never make a penny selling chess variants, is something I
find extremely interesting and very useful. You've seen a couple of my
non-chess games, Spaceships and 4War. I see very strong connections
between them and chess, on more than one level. 4War grew out of
Hyperchess. And I'm just starting to explore a Spaceships chess variant.
So I don't see a sharp line between 'genres'. They cross-pollinate. 
I'm very interested in this topic, but I'd like to see a number of
approaches to big board variants. For example, I oppose adding pieces
because there's more room on the board. (This is undoubtedly a minority
position, however. So I'm working to get the viewpoint adequately
represented and examined.) And I oppose having a large number of different
pieces because you've got all these pieces you just added because you had
more room and now you're trying to figure out what to do with them. This
affects playability in many ways. And I think playability is the first
consideration of game design. Not the only, but the first. Enjoy. Joe