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Hi Aurelian

I think a single 2 player Next Chess could arise someday, but it would probably be some sort of extension of chess. Say 2D and likely on a square/rectangular board with 8-12 ranks by 8-12 files. I now wouldn't completely rule out other fairly regular shapes, such as 91-cell hexagonal, or 16x4 (or 16x5) circular, boards. The 6 chess piece types likely would be included, plus some extra type(s) that move symmetrically or else not too asymmetrically. However, Ultima style games may be considered, if not too complex rulewise. Same for using boards with special squares and such, again if not too complex. Also, a game likely shouldn't last for a lot of moves on average, at least for many less patient westerners, so that may rule out e.g. Chu Shogi. With all these constraints (for starters), that rules out many existing chess variants to be a Next Chess.

As far as multiple Next Chess' at the same time in history, you may draw encouragement from knowing that according to some searches I did, there are currently 200 million playing Chinese Chess (mostly Chinese people, one might guess), while there are 600 million adults playing chess, and 10 million Japanese playing Shogi, of the three classic recognized variants. So, it's possible already, say, tens of millions of people play both Chinese Chess and chess at the same time.

The Chess Variant Pages is doing its share to promote popular variants with play on Game Courier, alone, although at the moment only a relative few variants have been played 50+ times on GC until now. Unless anyone is prepared to court businesses (as in the case of Musketeer Chess figurines being mass produced) or make their own blog entries, etc., playing on Game Courier and elsewhere is a relatively low cost way to promote variants in terms of time and effort alone.

As far as AI goes, I'm not too knowledgeable, but I'm wary of the possible downside of it based on much Sci-Fi material on that theme alone, if we set aside philosophical or religious beliefs. Regarding AI vs. AI chess variant contests, I'd note at least some people enjoy watching caged battlebots smashing each other on TV, stll. :) Otherwise, chess AI that's evenly matched tends to produce a high rate of drawn games, though the play of something like Shogi (or games where draws are impossible) could well avoid that happening.

The Apothecary 1 and Apothecary 2 games seemed playable enough the way they started out at first in their preset forms (I saw your proposed changes long ago). I'd note as a possible cautionary tale that Omega Chess had a sequel game that seemed way too complicated and/or quirky, based on my reading the wiki for Omega Chess. In my own case I prefer never to change the rules for a game once I make a preset for it (though not knowing much about the effects of making changes to presets that have already been used for playing game[s] influences that viewpoint). I'd suggest if you implement your proposed changes all the same, you might make Apothecary 3 and Apothecary 4 presets (or whatever they'd be called), in case some or many might wish to play the original versions of those two games (that is, Apothecary 1 and Apothecary 2). It seems, just looking at the numbers, quite a number of people were content to play each with their original rules at the time. I'd not fix something that wasn't clearly broke, would be my own preference.