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Sam Trenholme wrote on Mon, Jul 30, 2007 10:32 PM UTC:
In a previous posting in this thread had me look at the win/draw/loss ratio for the first player in Chess and some Capa variants. Looking at those numbers, I noted that Capa variants decrease the number of draws compared to FIDE Chess--but those draws become wins for White.

I also noted that the perfect game (for myself, at least) would both have no draws and no advantage for the first player to move.

Looking at some other games, it looks like drops helps us get closer to this ideal:

We can see that, particularily with Chessgi, White has a definite edge. One way of reducing that edge is to use the well-known 'pie rule':
  • Player #1 makes a move for white
  • Player #2 chooses whether to play white or black
  • The game continues normally
Another way of reducing this edge is to make the pieces less powerful; the chessgi Zillions rule file allows one to play 'Shantrajgi', which is Chessgi with the far less powerful Shantraj pieces.

Another idea is to take Capablanca chess, and add the pie rule in order to neutralize white's advantage. In fact, maybe it is possible to further reduce draws by adding even more powerful pieces to the armies. Hmmm, Grand Chess with the Amazon added, and the knights augmented with an Alfil (2 squares diagonal) jump, and the pie rule may make for an interesting game.

In reply to Derek's comments that the numbers at BrainKing may not be perfect: The numbers are the best numbers I can find for win/draw/loss ratios of chess variants. While not perfect (and no numbers in the real world ever are; this is why we really can't have piece values more accurate than 0.5 pawn or so), this gives us an idea of what variants will make for a fair, competitive variant where draws are rare and neither side has an unfair advantage.

One piece of data I wish I had was good win/loss/draw data on the doublemove variants. The nice thing about doublemove variants is that we can lower White's advantage by giving him only one move for his first move.