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Sam Trenholme wrote on Sun, Sep 10, 2006 02:22 PM UTC:
I have been watching this flame war for the last few days and have decided to finally add my two cents.

Dragon feels like one of those complicated war games that Avalon Hill used to make, before they went out of business (OK, bought out by Hasbro) in the late 1990s. Now, when Avalon Hill was bought out, many, many people on Usenet were upset. Avalon Hill war games did not have enough general appeal to sustain the company, but their games did have a small group of very dedicated devotees.

In terms of why people go to this site, in my case I feel that FIDE chess has been over-analysed, with many opening variations over 20 moves deep. Also, the most common defense against 1. e4 for black is the Sicilian, which Morphy (my favorite player) referred to as resulting in 'uninteresting games and dreary analytical labours'. Even Kasparov recently stated that 'the volume of opening theory has reached threatening proportions and calls for need to find a way to alleviate the pressure of the endless opening databases'.

I feel these issues can be addressed by fairly minor modifications to the rules of chess. Many chess players agree; when Bobby Fischer said that 'Chess is dead', he was promoting his own Fischer Random chess. Indeed, Kasparov has given Fischer Random (where the pieces are shuffled) a reluctant endorsment, pointing out that most random shufflings of the Chess pieces 'are poison to your eyes'.

My own endorsment is the same one Capablanca had: A 10x8 board with a rook + knight and bishop + knight pieces added. Making the board just a little bigger greatly increases the number of possible opening setups. 8x8 chess can only have 1,440 unique setups of the pieces; a 10x8 board has 126,000 possible opening setups.

But I'm diverging.

Back to 'Dragon' (not be be confused with Gygax' 'Dragon Chess'), I think this game would be a lot more playable if a computer program could help enforce the rules. I encourage Glenn Nicholls to make either a computer program that can play this game, or a Zillions preset, so that people can more easily see if this game suits their tastes or not.

And, yes, 'Dragon Random' would have a huge number of possible opening setups.


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