Single Comment

George, that's a very interesting idea of nominating 3 designs, one each
on 3 board sizes. To start, for 2009 you've nominated:''Maura's Modern
Chess 9x9 (with Bishop conversion), Winther's Mastodon Chess 8x10,and
Duniho's Eurasian Chess 10x10''. So let's take a look at them.

Maura's Modern 9x9
I think I'd like this better as a 9x8 for 'the next chess'; the pawns
don't work right with an odd number of squares between them, for orthodox
chess players. I'm not panning the game at all; it looks quite
interesting. I've played a few games where the pawns were an odd number
of rows apart. This changes the entire feel of the opening; there is more
pawn maneuver and the placement of minor pieces in the center is more
awkward. It adds another bit of piece shuffling to the opening phase. This
isn't bad; it forces players to think about pawn placement, and where and
how to situate a knight, say. This accomplishes a real goal of trashing
the opening book, something a variantist looks for, but this is not
necessarily what will make the orthodox happy. 

This looks like a very nice game. The added piece, the BN, is less
strong-feeling than either the RN or the RB, although HG Muller seems to
have demonstrated the rough equivalence of the 3 pieces. The bishop
adjustment rule is a nice kludge [as Fergus Duniho has defined kludges in
his recently referenced paper], bringing another opening book-killing
feature, a bit of non-symmetric random chess. All in all, this seems a
very nice game [not having played it, I cannot comment directly; having
played similar, I can comment a bit], but it feels like one that
variantists would like more than the orthodox would. It's a very nice,
close to chess game, but with enough significant differences, I suspect,
to prevent its being adopted as ... hmm, call it a chess equal by the
orthodox. The variantists should in general like this, and this sort of,
game.