Gary Gifford wrote on Sun, Apr 13, 2008 02:17 PM UTC:
To sum up my take on variant pieces:
1. It would be great to be able to buy them
2. The CV market appears to be too small to justify a large production
run
3. A production run would undoubtedly exclude many players' desired
pieces and desired boards
Rich, you ask, 'But if you happen to play someone a game, and they like
it, how will they be able to get the equipment to play it by themselves?'
That is a fair question. And it would be great if they could buy the pieces, board, or even the actual entire game. The first variant set I made was for my Pillars of Medusa. A few guys played it at work. It drew a crowd. However, even if they could buy it, would they? And if they could buy pieces, they'd likely get the rook/knight bishop/knight, queen/knight combo pieces... but they'd still have trouble because they'd need an 11 x 11 board a Medusa piece and a Morph piece. So even if they could buy variant pieces, I think they could always end up with a variant that they like that they simply wouldn't be able to buy all the pieces for.
I played Maxima using pieces made of bottle tops with the CV graphics
glued inside... it matched the CV pre-set and was thus great
visually.
I played Shogi with probably 8 different people face to face over the
years. All liked it, but we always used one of my 2 sets. Only one of
the 8 players bought Shogi. It was the same with Xianqi. I played
against a man from Viet Nam on his set. I liked the game a lot and made 2
sets of my own (one traditional Chinese style and one 3D Staunton style for
teaching Fide players the game). Later I ended up buying a large wooden
Xianqi set, an imitation jade set, and a magnetic one that resides on the
refrigerator. One of the people I played, a former member of Mensa,
bought a set.
There is, however, a very small market for Shogi and Xianqi in the U.S. If
it were not for their popularity in Asia I doubt that companies would be
keen on producing those sets. As a sad note... I believe the market for
other CVs is even smaller.
1. It would be great to be able to buy them
2. The CV market appears to be too small to justify a large production run
3. A production run would undoubtedly exclude many players' desired pieces and desired boards
Rich, you ask, 'But if you happen to play someone a game, and they like it, how will they be able to get the equipment to play it by themselves?'
That is a fair question. And it would be great if they could buy the pieces, board, or even the actual entire game. The first variant set I made was for my Pillars of Medusa. A few guys played it at work. It drew a crowd. However, even if they could buy it, would they? And if they could buy pieces, they'd likely get the rook/knight bishop/knight, queen/knight combo pieces... but they'd still have trouble because they'd need an 11 x 11 board a Medusa piece and a Morph piece. So even if they could buy variant pieces, I think they could always end up with a variant that they like that they simply wouldn't be able to buy all the pieces for.
I played Maxima using pieces made of bottle tops with the CV graphics glued inside... it matched the CV pre-set and was thus great visually.
I played Shogi with probably 8 different people face to face over the years. All liked it, but we always used one of my 2 sets. Only one of the 8 players bought Shogi. It was the same with Xianqi. I played against a man from Viet Nam on his set. I liked the game a lot and made 2 sets of my own (one traditional Chinese style and one 3D Staunton style for teaching Fide players the game). Later I ended up buying a large wooden Xianqi set, an imitation jade set, and a magnetic one that resides on the refrigerator. One of the people I played, a former member of Mensa, bought a set.
There is, however, a very small market for Shogi and Xianqi in the U.S. If it were not for their popularity in Asia I doubt that companies would be keen on producing those sets. As a sad note... I believe the market for other CVs is even smaller.