🕸Fergus Duniho wrote on Tue, Apr 3, 2018 02:27 PM UTC:
By famous, I actually mean merely famous. Some variants are famous for reasons other than popularity or quality. Shatranj was played for a long time without competition from better variants, and it is a seminal game in the history of Chess. Chaturanga for Four Players is a historic variant that some people have claimed is the original form of Chess. Tamerlane Chess is a well-known historic variant. Los Alamos Chess is notable for being the first Chess variant played by a computer, though this is due to Chess being too complicated for early computers, not to any special appeal of the game for human players. Dragonchess is widely known among D&D players, because it was created by the inventor of D&D and published in Dragon magazine, which many D&D players subscribed to, but I expect very few of them began playing the game. Star Trek Tridimensional Chess is widely known to Star Trek fans, and its unique design and the popularity of Star Trek have made it emblematic of Chess variants in general, yet very few people who know of the game actually play it. All-in-all, I think we could remove every game in this category from the Recognized variants list without taking away anything important from it.
By famous, I actually mean merely famous. Some variants are famous for reasons other than popularity or quality. Shatranj was played for a long time without competition from better variants, and it is a seminal game in the history of Chess. Chaturanga for Four Players is a historic variant that some people have claimed is the original form of Chess. Tamerlane Chess is a well-known historic variant. Los Alamos Chess is notable for being the first Chess variant played by a computer, though this is due to Chess being too complicated for early computers, not to any special appeal of the game for human players. Dragonchess is widely known among D&D players, because it was created by the inventor of D&D and published in Dragon magazine, which many D&D players subscribed to, but I expect very few of them began playing the game. Star Trek Tridimensional Chess is widely known to Star Trek fans, and its unique design and the popularity of Star Trek have made it emblematic of Chess variants in general, yet very few people who know of the game actually play it. All-in-all, I think we could remove every game in this category from the Recognized variants list without taking away anything important from it.