Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

David, thanks for the references; I particularly enjoyed the piece value
discussions. [I read the Piecelopedia comments on the camel, also.] Legler
also increases power on the board by about 1/6, roughly. I suspect most of
us who care or think about this would agree that that's too much power
for a serious and subtle game. Bash, smash and crash is a different story;
many of us like a whole pile of high-powered pieces in a shoot-em-up style
game for fun, but I doubt many of us believe this is the way chess is
going in the future. 

George and Gary have proposed similar pieces, lesser versions of the BN
and RN. George has lamed the knight component, offering a rook-mao and a
bishop-moa [if I got the names right]. Gary has offered functionally all
but identical pieces, with the rook-ferz and the bishop-wazir. 

This 'seems' to be a trend. I think we have one answer to the way chess
is going. Chessplayers want to 'upgun'. Are there other realistic
possibilities, or do we all trade in our .38s for .45s and have done with
it?

Was going to go to bed after my last comment, but Gary beat me to the punch
again.

I don't think that I am in any way advocating less power on the
chessboard. What I am suggesting is a different distribution of the power.
I'm not shy about putting power pieces on a chessboard - look at the piece
values in Lemurian/Atlantean Barroom and see if you'd be willing to play
the FIDE/Grand  Chess pieces against them. Linear distance traveled is not
the only measure of power.

Douglas Silfen has just posted 'Iron Guard' chess, where the white queen
is replaced by an invulnerable [cannot be captured at all] guard piece.
What's the value of that piece that only moves 1 square per turn?

Joe, many thanks for pointing out Douglas Silfen's Iron Guard chess.  You
state the white queen is replaced by an invulnerable 1-space mover guard piece which can never be captured.  This serves as another excellent example of a piece that can be used on an 8x8 board (or other size) in creating a game which is close to Fide Chess.

Back one day, to JJoyce's question, what would players most accept
for change keeping 8x8, I would say the Queen. Notice that everyone stays
in their Comments within pre-established philosophical zone we have heard
before. GGifford is the eternal apologist for FIDE OrthoChess as having
been perfected. Oppositely, we maintain consistently that mad Queen, your
Orthodox, is dead. Or, as the Judge said 100 years ago in sentencing
cannibal Alferd Packard to be hanged til he's 'dead, dead, dead'(he was
later commuted), Orthodox Chess is dead, dead, dead. Who wants to master
what Computers find the right move for in split seconds? Sure a million
zombies are still playing it, but Internet play in particular becomes morally corrupting in encouraging computer aid(cheating) and dissuading creative moves. Some mores, or social changes, go fast, others drag on at length: it took Christianity couple  hundreds of years to replace the religions of Nature, hearth, and usages that prevailed around the Mediterranean: actually FIDE-type mad-Queen has been steadily dying for 150 years already.  Precisely Computers are why FIDE replacements, whatever 2 or 20, evolving must continue to evolve(not synonymous with 'to progress'), to stay ahead of them.  100% agreement with JJoyce that their FIDE can increasingly be ignored for all the new forms and means emerging.

In terms of replacing Chess, I think Arimaa has the best chance, simply because it doesn't suffer from the 'My laptop can beat a grandmaster' problem that Chess has.

But, I don't think all Chess players will give up Chess tomorrow and start playing Arimaa day after tomorrow. It's more like, should Arimaa succeed, people will start to get turned on to Arimaa at a faster pace than Chess players will lost interest in Chess or die.

Once nice thing about Arimaa is that it's easy to make a variant on a Triangle, Rhombus, Hex, or any other strange board: Just define the place where the rabbits need to go, the places where each side sets up their pieces, the trap squares, and you're good to go.

- Sam

I agree, Sam, about this 'replacing' talk. What I say is, if you want to
replace FIDE chess, why, go right ahead and replace it. There's no point
in just talking about it.

Hey, Sam, my apologies. I believe I was the first to use the expression
'replace FIDE' here on this site.  It was an innocent use; I am [oddly]
neither a chessplayer nor a visitor to chess sites*, and had I known the
expression was inflamatory, I never would have used it. 

To anyone who has been offended, you have my sincere apologies. It was
never my intent to have more than a good theoretical discussion of where
chess could go. I do notice that no one here has taken the opportunity to
turn up the heat. And the discussion has been going on for a while. I
would think [and hope] that we can continue the discussion in the same
vein without anyone being offended by the phrase. Certainly this site of
any in the world is the place to discuss the topic in a [relatively - I
know us *here* too well to hope for anything better :-) ] calm and mature
manner. And I think a good percentage of the participants and readers of
this site either do or could enjoy the discussion. 

Joe

* I very infrequently visit Chessville, because a friend writes chess
fiction which shows up there occasionally; that's all I look for, that
friend's work.

Card games, particularly poker, are doing quite well--mainly because players are more open to playing variants. There was a time when 5 card stud was the cool form of poker. These days it's Texas Hold-'em. It'll probably be another variant within 20 years.

I wish Chess did the same thing.

- Sam

Okay, then, let's get on with the replacement. [And Mark, with my shatranj
variants, I'm obviously trying to re-write history to prevent FIDE from
ever evolving... ;-) ]

Where have we gotten to? The general thrust of the recent past [at least]
has been to modify a bit the bishop and rook by giving them a knight's,
lame knight's, or guard's move in addition to their slide - the
upgunning principle. For simplicity, I'd like to call the 3 similar
changes above the 'B-R Stronger' modification, whether it plays out on
an 8x8, 8x10, or 10x10. I think we can safely say that the B-R Stronger
mod, in whatever particular form, is the strongest candidate for 'The
Next Change', if only by virtue of it showing up over and over again to
the exclusion of almost everything else.

I admit to finding this rather uninteresting; for one thing, it's already
been done repeatedly, and I suspect both Gary and George's versions are
better than the standard one of Chancellor and Archbishop because they
don't push the mod to its practical limit like the standard. 

What else is there?

'What else is there?' The 'normal' modification made to chesspieces is
to add the knight move to them. The bishop and the rook are the usual
suspects, but the other 2 pieces, queen and knight itself, have also
rather often been modified in the same way, creating the Amazon and the
Nightrider. If I may, I'll call these the Q Stronger mod and the N
stronger mod.

I like the Amazon as a piece in the Maharajah and Sepoys or Tigerhunt
types of games, where the Amazon takes on [most of] the FIDE army, and
nowhere else that I can think of. If it can take on 15-16 piece FIDE
armies by itself with a fair chance of winning [until you get to rather
high-level play at least], then I submit it is too strong a piece. I'm
sure some will differ, but I'd love to hear those people explain away the
previous 2 sentences in this paragraph. 

George states 'the Queen is dead', or certainly should be. Since it's
~twice as powerful as the next most powerful piece, he may well have a
point. But I can live with the Queen, and for many people, it's their
favorite piece. But is there anyone who will defend modifying FIDE by
changing the Queen to an Amazon?

JJoyce for one has misapprehension about 'Mad Queen' and phrase 'Mad
Queen is Dead' repeated. He is in good company one supposes because it
had to be explained to FDuniho years ago. Italian 'Regina Rabiosa' (and
Spanish 'Reina Loca' we have also seen) was simply the Latin-area name
from the outset for the 64-square Chess following Shatranj. 'Regina
Rabiosa' does not refer to the Queen per se, but to the game. See
HJRMurray reference 'History of Chess' 1912. So, 'Mad Queen' is
synonymous with OrthoChess(DPritchard's favourite usage), FIDE Chess,
Orthodox Chess -- all the same. We left out the history lately because
Comments already covered it twice. Their revolution in the 1490's was to
bring on board 'Modern' Bishop, 'Modern' Queen, and Pawn two-step option. Much later in 1800's came more standardized Rules for Castling and En Passant. Even play of varying forms of this same 6-piece-type RNBQKP with Passar Bataglia or Italian free castling, we would tend to call Mad Queen Chess from its original name. Even FischerRandom we are inclined to call Mad Queen, being  basically the same ancient form. To drive home its antiquity, initiation of Regina Rabiosa, following Shatranj, goes back to before either Shakespeare or Pocahantas were born. [WShakespeare's 'The Tempest' with setting in Caribbean America has the famous scene of Ferdinand and Miranda playing Chess including her line 'O Brave New World that has such people in it', (over Chess)]

Hey, George, thanks for the history lessons, I do appreciate them. I
wouldn't know where to begin to find that info myself; just diving into
old comments and articles gives neither context nor any idea of what you
will find before you actually see each piece. 
I do have a question regarding your comment about my historical
understanding of the knights - where am I misunderstanding them, it's not
obvious to me? 
Finally, Jeremy had asked me which of my shatranj pieces the falcon would
work well with, and I do think it would do well with all but the most
powerful of the pieces. So I'll be looking at games with falcons, heroes,
and shamans, for example; think they'd be a nice match. If you replace the
Q with the F and the Ns with Hs, and you've got a game with more overall
power than FIDE, but shorter ranged. Make the rooks AR4s and the bishops
DB4s, and that becomes even more true. And to wrap up, what would you
think of a Falcon-Guard power piece? Or a pair of royal Falcons, both
needing to be captured to win, replacing the K & Q, along with the
alternate rooks, bishops and heroes?