Comments by Lawrence Smith

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Thoughts on large numbers of players in one chess game. Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

💡📝Lawrence Smith wrote on Mon, Mar 9, 2015 05:47 AM UTC:

My current thrust is to come up with a form of social chess - something that might be played more casually than most of the other multi-player versions. I'm not sure how your comments apply to these ideas - the concept of letting players choose their own opponent rather than assigning one by position is intriguing, but requires the players to weigh questions of relative placements in order to attack or defend. As normal chess has a very hard and fast opponent rule (beat the other guy) it seems more logical to allow the order of play also determine victory and failure conditions. I had assumed the game "won" when the first checkmate occurred. In terms of making a more challenging game, many of the other comments you made would certainly apply - such as taking over the pieces of a checkmated opponent and going on the checkmate others, for example - but this would also lengthen the game, and one of the problems I am trying to address here is that the games just run too long, people don't get to play fast enough, and lose interest.

💡📝Lawrence Smith wrote on Mon, Mar 9, 2015 05:49 AM UTC:

I should say the board I am currently experimenting with is more like a chinese checker board, with the idea that it allows symmetric victory conditions for 2, 3, 4 and 6 players (sadly, not five, as the gap in the who-vs-who rotation gives one player and extra advantage and one player an extra disadvantage.)

Sovereign Chess. Ten neutral armies can be activated on this 16 x 16 board. (16x16, Cells: 256) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

Lawrence Smith wrote on Mon, Mar 9, 2015 05:59 AM UTC:

I have one observation on this form of chess - while I love the idea and find it very exciting to contemplate, I am amongst the 20% or so of human males that are going to have real problems playing with it (women, darn them, will not have this problem, it's a sex-linked gene). Men with red/green color blindness can have a great deal of trouble distinguishing colors that are too similar unless they also differ in intensity (color-blind men are usually more sensitive to intensity relative to "normal" vision men). Since it can be quite a challenge to tailor the exact colors of a set of chessmen made by the usual methods (which typically use full-saturation and thus tend to cause problems for the color-blind) this may become a disadvantage in marketing. Sadly, the only other way I can suggest is to use patterns (blue-with-white stripe, blue-with-black stripe for instance) but I don't know if such pieces can be had for a reasonable amount of money. This problem may be insoluble in principle (or any other country or state =)

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