Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

In case you missed it Fergus, please see my previous (much older) post in this subject thread. The gist of it is that I think reference links, such as the one for this topic, perhaps ought to be easier to find, possibly via a CVP [sub-] main menu item.

Kevin

This page is now listed on the Who page.

Thanks Fergus. I hadn't checked that page for any possibly recent addition, such as this particular reference item.

Tonight I've been thinking about the rate of inventions I've produced so far that have anything substantially novel about them (ideally ground-breaking in some way). By my estimate only about 30% (9 of 32) of my CVP editorially approved inventions to date have anything about them I'd consider to be such. Oddly, of the games of mine most played on Game Courier to date, all have nothing much original about them, other than their recombining of piece types others have come up with, on square or rectangular boards of several sizes. I'm wondering how hard it is to come up with truly novel stuff that still seems to be of good design.

I went through many of the most productive CVP inventors games, as I found them with this CV Inventors page, and there seemed to be a very high rate of producing substantially novel games - sometimes a fair number of special rules were introduced, if little else. I only found one inventor thus far who seemed to produce a high rate of games that seemed to be not very novel ('leapers & sliders' on various sized boards might about sum it up), but one future CVP editor noted that this particular inventor seems to have generally given a lot of care to his game designing.

The main reason for my musings, though, is that I have 5 game invention ideas I'm currently thinking about, though they more or less all lack that special kind of novelty I've alluded to above. I hid diagrams of their tentative setups here and there already on CVP, mainly with quiet edits, for my future study, in case my current doubts about them turn to optimism, in some or all cases. Ideally I'd like them to be played lots over time, if they go on to have presets, but they may be worth saving in CVP database regardless.[edit: 22-Nov-2019: Currently I'm not liking any of my 5 game invention ideas, alluded to above, very much; 2 were depicted in my 'Diagram testing thread', and 3 were depicted in one of my comments to the game of Courier-Spiel.][edit2: 14-Dec-2019: Using edits, this day I've put 7 more CV ideas on CVP for me to study; 3 are depicted in one of my comments to my Frog Chess CV, 3 are depicted in one of my comments to my Parity Chess preset, and 1 is depicted in one of my comments to Amazon Grand Chess - and another 2 CV ideas were previously added to one of my comments to Courier-Spiel.][edit3: 15-Dec-2019: I'm now not much liking any of the CV ideas alluded to in my second edit, either.]

It is true that new variants that just slam a number of sliders, leapers, hoppers and their compounds on a rectangular board of some size are not very innovative. Even if some of the pieces they feature have never been tried before. In a sense it is like they are all the same 'meta-variant' that has a number of adjustable parameters, and by turning the knobs you can set them to values that are never tried in that combination before. As Pritchard said: "it takes only 10 sec to invent a new chess variant, and unfortunately some people do". This doesn't mean that they cannot be entertaining to play, of course. Or that they are all of the same quality. Some non-trivial work can still go in picking the initial setup, making sure all pieces can be easily developed (remove any 'awkwardness'), all pieces are protected against possible quick attacks, and such. The spectrum of piece powers is also an important factor in how attractive the game is.

Still even there you can sometimes express a novel idea. In my variant Team-Mate Chess I used a collection of not-so-special pieces that were selected to not have mating potential (against a bare King) on their own, but always must force checkmate in pairs (similar to Bishop + Knight in orthodox Chess).

BTW, it seems my productivity is overrated in the list above: it says I invented 13 variants, but it attributes Wa and Tenjiku Shogi to me, while these are just historic Japanese games for which I made a rule-description page. (I also made such pages for Chu, Dai, Dai Dai and Maka Dai Dai Shogi, Paco Shako and Metamachy, but these were (justly) not attributed to me.) It also counts my article on FairyGen as a game invention, while this is just a description of a piece of software for generating End-Game Tables involvng fairy pieces.

BTW, it seems my productivity is overrated in the list above: it says I invented 13 variants, but it attributes Wa and Tenjiku Shogi to me, while these are just historic Japanese games for which I made a rule-description page. (I also made such pages for Chu, Dai, Dai Dai and Maka Dai Dai Shogi, Paco Shako and Metamachy, but these were (justly) not attributed to me.) It also counts my article on FairyGen as a game invention, while this is just a description of a piece of software for generating End-Game Tables involvng fairy pieces.

It's now down to ten. I took care of the two Shogi variants, and FairyGen already wasn't listed.

Thanks for the reply H.G.; it is encouraging - though I still hope to one day produce more innovative CVs (IMHO).

Team-Mate Chess looks like a great CV for practicing ones' endgame technique.

Regarding your offered concept of 'meta-variants', assuming it can one day be perfectly defined, and broken down into all the already existing examples that are on CVP, it is something that appears to have slipped between the cracks for CVP. Fergus' seminal article (see CVP home page) on what makes for a CV, in the first place, IMHO breaks down various CVs, as they are differentiated from chess itself, into 6 ways of changing chess (or one might say, 6 parameters in doing so), one of which is to combine the other 5 parameters in some fashion. Then there are a number of categories CVP database organizes CVs into, such as Large Board, 3D etc.; note that I'd call 3D or higher dimensional variants a 'meta-variant', but possibly some may dispute this.

Other examples of what I'd personally recognize as meta-variants would be Ultima-style ones (Ultima was the ground-breaking CV for this), as would be variants with some type of drop (on Game Courier 'pockets' are used for storing single pieces, and also used are what I'd call 'sleeves', for storing unlimited numbers of pieces to drop) - shogi was the ground-breaking CV for this concept. Note that Chinese Chess was ground-breaking for at least its use of the then innovative cannon piece, besides having a palace limiting where a K could move to; Chinese Chess, with its use of a palace, possibly is the lead member of a meta-variant category, too.

Regarding shogi-style variants without drops, other than the 'physical' apperance of the board and pieces, I'm not sure what makes them substantially different from chesslike CVs that simply use different leapers & sliders on various board sizes (in terms of being a possible meta-variant), other than there are a lot of asymmetric and/or short-range moving pieces instead, and often a small number of special/powerful pieces that can wipe out a lot of weak enemy units if a breakthrough happens (however, other than for shogi itself, I'm pretty unfamiliar with these various CVs). A similar sort of argument might be made about shatranj-like CVs, perhaps. As an aside, perhaps an otherwise mundane  CV that introduces a novel piece (such as in many shatranj variants) might be worthy of being considered ground-breaking, especially if the piece were to prove as iconic as a Chinese Chess cannon.

From CVP home page - What is a Chess Variant?:

https://www.chessvariants.com/what.html

When the Cannon was introduced it could be called ground-breaking, because it introduced an entirely new class of moves: obligatory hopping over other pieces. Such moves are not as elementary as leaps, because they depend on occupancy of other squares than the origin and destination of the move. But one could already say that of sliding moves, which require all passed-over squares to be empty; the hoppers just impose another, more general condition than emptiness on such squares. Xiangqi is also somewhat unique in that it confines certain pieces to certain zones of the board; this could be seen as a special case of endowing pieces with location-dependent moves (namely scrapping precisely those moves that would leave the zone, in each location), which is very un-chess-like.

You are correct in pointing out the large Shogi variants are mostly just run-of-the-mill Chess variants, except for perhaps a hand full of innovative pieces (Lion, Hook Mover, Fire Demon.) But they still have a very different and easily recognized 'flavor': pieces tend to move only along the principal (orthogonal or diagonal) rays, and oblique leaps are almost completely absent. (And those that are there are then usually an incidental consequence of some multi-move rule, such as Lion = double-move King.) I have a theory that this is a consequence of the different Pawn move: the FIDE Pawn, capturing diagonally, tends to form chains of Pawns protecting each other. Which are very hard to break down by frontal attack once the chains interlock. You then need oblique leaps badly to be able to undermine these structures by attacking their weak spots in the rear, which are usually unreachable by Queen-moves only. And it doesn't matter much how few pieces you have that can make the move required in the case at hand, as the Pawn chains are quasi-static structures, and won't go away. So you will have enough time to manoeuvre the required piece into position. Shogi has none of this, as Pawns can never protect each other there (and after the invention of drops they added a rule for keeping it that way!). So there is no great need for oblique moves, and to get a large-enough variety of pieces with Queen-moves only, they turned to pieces with very low symmetry.

Another distinctive trait of the Shogi flavor is that virtually all pieces can promote (usually only with modest gain in abilities), while in western variants promotion is reserved for Pawns, offering the possibility to turn the weakest piece into the strongest one. In principle these traits could be easily mixed, but in practice this is not often done. Scirocco is a good example of a chess variant that combines design characteristics of Shogi and western chess variants.

But since the invention of the Cannon and the Grasshopper, and the introduction of asymmetric pieces, putting such moves on a piece in some combination that was never used before can no longer be called 'innovative'. There must be millions of such combinations possible even on an 8x8 board, and I am pretty sure the combination of moving diagonally forward like a Cannon, leaping like a Camel, and moving backwards like a Xiangqi Elephant (just to name something crazy) has never been tried. So what? Unless there is a very good reason why this move would make the game it appears in better than any other, 'inventing' the piece is not more creative than writing down a random number of 60 digits of which you can be virtually certain no one in the Universe has ever used (or even thought of) it before.

Truly innovative pieces are for instance Mats Winther's bifurcators, which generalize the principle of a hopper in various ways (by not only allowing change of move/capture rights on encountering an obstacle in their path, but also of the move direction, and the exact location where this change occurs). Inventors also often resort to associating a move with side effects to create something new, usually locust capture at squares that in various different ways can depend on the move (e.g. Advancers, Withdrawers), but also displacement of pieces on such squares (Magnetic or Catapult pieces).

I do not consider games like Ultima or Aarima chess variants at all. Even Paco Shako is a dubious case. Replacement capture is one of the defining traits of chess variants, and while it is OK to have the occasional exception (such as e.p. capture), a game that does (almost) entirely away with it no longer feels like chess at all. You might as well call Checkers, Ataxx or Amazons a chess variant. Clobber is a somewhat dubious case. 'Chess variant' is not a synonym for 'board game'.

Thanks for the lengthy reply H.G.; the explanation of shogi-like variants was a good reminder to me about those CVs.

One doubt I have though is that Ultima games normally at least include chess kings, and checkmating one is always at least one victory condition one can have in a given game, at least if we exclude something like Bombalot, which has no K, but is otherwise Ultima-like (so I'm not at all sure why I should reject them as CVs). This comes pretty close to what Fergus wrote about when he defined what a CV is (or is not), in the link I gave in my previous post in this thread. I can also imagine that some Ultima piece might be created (besides a chess king) that has (or has as an option) capture by displacement. Arimaa and checkers, on the other hand, are clearly not CVs, and indeed Fergus' article in the link I gave does single out checkers as not being a CV.

Borrowing merely a single piece from a game IMO is not enough to qualify as a variant of that game. Note that the idea that capture of a single designated piece (rather than total extinction) is not exclusive to Chess; Hnefatafl and Stratego are also won in this way. The royal piece must not be too mobile, or the game could virtually never be won, and limiting the motion to just the adjacent squares is one of the most obvious things to do that.

There will of course always be boundary cases, but for my taste Ultima is not even that. It really doesn't have anything in common with Chess that it also doesn't have in common with several other games. Queen moves are also pretty elementary, and common in other games (e.g. Amazons). Replacement capture also occurs in Clobber and Stratego.

Stratego is an interesting case - I fail to see why it's not a CV, at least at the moment(!) Here's Google's blurb on whether Stratego is like chess, fwiw: "Stratego has a bigger board, more pieces of more different kinds, and a more complex combat resolution system in which the attacker does not always win, as in chess. - Jan 21, 2015"; I'd still think that Stratego meets Fergus' criteria for being a CV.

Caissa Britannia has a highly mobile royal piece (Q), fwiw, though it moves under some restriction (cannot move through check, I seem to recall) - that could still fit in with what you are saying, it seems.

Another name for one other game you mention is 'Viking Chess', fwiw, though it appears to me (from the wiki) that only one side has some sort of a king:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games#Hnefatafl

It looks like the game of Clobber only has one piece type, and I should note that Fergus' article rules that sort of game out as a CV - it seems that Clobber isn't much different from checkers in this way; Fergus' criteria would also rule out Amazons as a CV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clobber

Stratego is not a game of perfect information, which makes it very non-chess-like. It is somewhat similar to Banqi ("Chinese Dark Chess") in this respect. Dark Chess or Kriegspiel I also doubt, but these at least are absolutely normal Chess in all other respects, so that they would count according to the criterion that a single fatal flaw can be forgiven if it is completely orthodox in all other respects. Stratego, however, has different board size, different number of pieces, the replacement capture is subject to ranking of the type and can backfire, the royal piece does not move... Even when all pieces would be in plain view it would be nothing like orthodox Chess or one of the other major regional chess variants.

As to Clobber: I don't really believe that this should count as a chess variant, but if you think about it, it gets close. Several games normally considered chess variants lack one of the defining characteristics of chess. E.g. Suicide Chess does not have a royal piece, Marseillais Chess moves two pieces per turn. Clobber does not have many piece types, but precisely because it has only one you could consider that (extinction) royalty, and then it satisfies all other criteria. In Horde (Lord Dunsahy's Game) one of the players also only has Pawns, and in Maharadja and the Sepoys one player only has a single (royal) Maharadja.

I did not want to suggest Amazons could be a chess variant; on the contrary, I gave it as an example of a game that is clearly not a CV, but yet has a piece that moves like a Queen. To show that the fact that in Ultima most pieces move like a Queen doesn't make it a chess variant anymore than that it makes it an Amazons variant.

Interesting. With the sport of curling described as 'chess on ice', or commentators referring to sports coaches as 'playing a game of chess', I suppose the definition of what is or is not a CV is quite malleable. :)

Last year at the ICGA Computer Games Conference 'Computer Curling' was actually one of the big things. The attraction was that it was a game with a continuous rather than a discrete game state, which makes exhaustive listing of all possible moves impossible. I suppose that to make it difficult there must be some randomness added to the move that you specify, as with infinite precision there would be no difference between an easy and a difficult turn.

Intresting,  I remember once thinking about an elliptical target for curling!...

I have several of my games on Jocly, no 0! Shako, Wild Tamerlane, Metamachy, Gigachess, Terachess, Rollerball.

Most of the games supported by Jocly don't have individual pages, which is what is being counted here.

I have several of my games on Jocly, no 0! Shako, Wild Tamerlane, Metamachy, Gigachess, Terachess, Rollerball.

It now says you have six games on Jocly, and they're the six you listed.