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Joe Joyce wrote on Mon, Aug 10, 2009 02:34 PM UTC:
I suspect that the chess/wargame hybrids will be as varied as all the rest
of our CVs. I've been working on military chess variants for a couple
years, and I abstracted a completely different list of things to put into a
hybrid. And without the help of Carlos, David, Gary, Jeremy, Larry, Uri and
others whom I'm sure I'm forgetting right now*, the rest of you would be
spared all this. I'm grateful. Your mileage may vary.   *added 1 name

The first obvious difference between wargames and chess variants is the
size; wargames are roughly an order of magnitude larger, in both board and
pieces, than chess variants. Wargames are also richer in features than
variants, leaders and terrain being 2. In general, combat units are much
slower than chesspieces; a wargame unit generally moves only a small
fraction of board length as a maximum movement. And in wargames, a
significant fraction of an army is usually moved each turn, if not every
unit. How to merge the two? And, incidentally, control the chaos of very
large multi-move chess games? [It was obvious a military sort of CV would
pretty much have to be a multi-move game.]

Leaders were a very good way to get a handle on most of the problems of 
large [some would say too large] wargame-type CVs, so I replaced 1 king
with several leaders. Now, a piece can't move until a leader 'tells' it
to. Coupled with short range pieces, leaders able to give orders only to
pieces they were near produced a very nice um, medium-sized [to me anyway]
12x16 game, Chieftain Chess [which by the way, is actually a shatranj
variant - it came directly from Lemurian Shatranj]. 
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSchieftainchess

Chief starts with 8 clans having just arrived at the edges of a large
field to do battle, 4 against 4. The players deploy the 2 armies and move
across the field, maneuvering to gain advantage in one area of the board or
another. Capture is the traditional FIDE capture by replacement - pieces
move onto enemy squares, and stop, removing the enemy pieces. All pieces
are clearly chesslike. But the character of the game has changed a bit:
instead of attacking 'through time', players attack 'across space'. A
typical chess game involves many attacks in a few areas that are carried
on, and calculated, across many turns. A Chieftain game features many
attacks across the entire board each turn, and these attacks generally last
only a few turns in time before the battle has swept away from that area to
someplace new. 

This is closer to a wargame, but there are 'flaws' in this chess
simulation of a wargame. By the end of the game, both armies are utterly
destroyed, with the winning player having between 2 and 6 pieces left, and
the loser, nothing. The game is also very unforgiving; get a single piece
down early, and that can easily cost you the game at the end. Now, this is
not a bad thing for chess. In fact, I suspect most good players would
appreciate knowing a game like this is all pure skill. Still, a wargame
features a little more flexibility. In Chief, losing 1 leader without
getting one of your opponent's means you will lose the game quickly,
'every' time. [Like blundering away your queen for nothing.] This is not
a feature of most battles. [But it is, fortunately, very much a feature of
a good chess game. For what it's worth, I can recommend Chieftain Chess as
a very nice and very different chess variant.]

This is already overlong, and there's more I'd like to say [you have
been warned!] so I'll continue with things that have and haven't worked,
or haven't worked yet, in another post.

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