Enter Your Reply

While I'm waiting for parts to fix my computer, I sometimes get to borrow
an old laptop. Figure I've been too quiet lately, and George has been
talking baseball, so I say: 'Go Mets!' and point out he's still talking
little boards.

A while back, I argued that it's possible to design a 100x100 [10,000
squares] chess variant that is both interesting and playable by human
beings in a reasonable amount of time. At that time, I had a very playable
16x12 [Chieftain Chess], and was experimenting with a 24x24 and a 30x20.
The experiments were fruitful, but possibly* a little too ambitious - not
in size, but in scope, as they had too many ideas crammed in, far more
than a new design should have. I plan to re-visit them in the future, and
pare them down to manageable games. Not make them smaller, but rather
sleeker and cleaner. [In other words, dump all that extra stuff I crammed
into them... maybe someday I'll learn.] Anyway, went back to Chieftain,
and realized it was scalable. Extend the board to 24x12, play a game, and
it becomes obvious that this game can literally be extended indefinitely,
without any increase in the number of turns per game, which is maybe 40.
Of course, the games are multi-movers, with 1 piece in 8 able to move at
start. And now, even though I'm a Mets fan, I'll take a leaf from the
Falcons playbook, ending here, to continue later.
* 'possibly', ha! absolutely is more like it.