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IAGO Chess System. http://abstractgamers.org/wiki/iago-chess. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
💡📝Rich Hutnik wrote on Thu, Apr 3, 2008 01:42 AM UTC:
Joe, I think you are fairly close.  What IAGO/IAGO World Tour is trying to do is have abstract strategy games, as a collective whole, go through what poker has become, so we have a large-scale version of the poker craze, or what was seen in the 1970s with Chess.  But it will pick up variants along the way.  The point is to create an environment favorable for growth.  This is also meant to coordinate with large scale abstract strategy games associations that are covering games with tens of millions of players worldwide to.

As for what IAGO Chess is (aka, the IAGO Chess System) is maybe it is best to think of it as 'Chess in IAGO' rather than 'IAGO Chess'.  It is meant as a way for IAGO to integrate variants and coordinate them playing together, to actually be an extension and support for the Chess Variants site.  IAGO World Tour Enterprises (this is the business name for the IAGO World Tour) will be looking to promote the chess variants site, its tournaments, and so on.  For this, the IAGO Chess System is meant to facilitate that in multiple ways, including having a version of Capablanca Chess on an 8x8 board that will be designed to integrate the world of Chess Variant pieces into it.  The intent of that is for the community to help evolve it.  It is meant to mainstream the variants community, by acting as an official body to give them credibility.  It is something that my hope would be people give their two cents into to have it go right, not just stay on the sidelines and complain about this and that.  

And yes, one of the object is to finally get some real pieces for the variant community to have to facilitate their adoption. I would definitely like to have world championships of chess variants in physical locations somewhere, and having the real pieces helps.  Getting an IAGO Store for sale would help also.  But, of course, there will need to be a community that gets behind all this.  Production runs of pieces will cost thousands of dollars to get going.

As for why it is needed, please look around now and ask yourself if you are honestly happy with the state of things.  Do you like things being small time and not able to acquire game equipment anywhere?  Do you like actually having to make up game boards on the fly?  And if you try to show them to people who don't play chess variants, do they actually want to play your game?