Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

These two are chess war-games on the footsteps of WWII, Chess-Battle and Novo Chess.
http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/chessbattle.html
http://www.chessvariants.org/wargame.dir/novo/novo.html

George, those games look interesting.  What I am trying to do here though,
is view chess through the eyes of a wargame, not adopt a particular war or
era of war to chess.  Idea is to see if Chess could become something like
ASL or a wargame system with scenarios, rather than locking down tanks and
whatnot as if they were part of a static game like chess.  So, to this end,
I am interested in having the categories I laid out, critiqued and expanded
upon.

Right. Goddesschess, one of my 3 favourite chess websites, http://www.goddesschess.com 
has a contrary view of Chess as game of goddess, based on subversion of that tradition that engined humanity for 100,000 years. However, I tend to view chess as in fact war sublimated from the very beginning of CVPage with this work,
http://www.chessvariants.org/fiction.dir/poems/falcon.html. Here there are ''war-words,'' ''swords'' and ''halcyon stand-off'' in fear of war, and ''Sport'' which is also civilized war, and ''rituals of place and power'' for war and politics. Let's take them one by one, the categories, first with Terrain. Terrain has three components, Earth, Water, and Air. Atmosphere, physicists point out, is not ''up there'' but down here on account of gravity. So it's all-terrain all-out war through three media at least.
''Magnificent. Compared to war all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God help me, I do love it so.'' --General George Patton
http://www.military-quotes.com/Patton.htm

Rich.

In the yahoo group, there is a very funny text that compares chess as a
brand new war game, Ibelive that somoe of your questions are in there.

Others can be developed here.

With this text in mind, I've been thinking about a wargame variant, in a
huge board.

Take a look at it.

Hugs!

I suspect that the chess/wargame hybrids will be as varied as all the rest
of our CVs. I've been working on military chess variants for a couple
years, and I abstracted a completely different list of things to put into a
hybrid. And without the help of Carlos, David, Gary, Jeremy, Larry, Uri and
others whom I'm sure I'm forgetting right now*, the rest of you would be
spared all this. I'm grateful. Your mileage may vary.   *added 1 name

The first obvious difference between wargames and chess variants is the
size; wargames are roughly an order of magnitude larger, in both board and
pieces, than chess variants. Wargames are also richer in features than
variants, leaders and terrain being 2. In general, combat units are much
slower than chesspieces; a wargame unit generally moves only a small
fraction of board length as a maximum movement. And in wargames, a
significant fraction of an army is usually moved each turn, if not every
unit. How to merge the two? And, incidentally, control the chaos of very
large multi-move chess games? [It was obvious a military sort of CV would
pretty much have to be a multi-move game.]

Leaders were a very good way to get a handle on most of the problems of 
large [some would say too large] wargame-type CVs, so I replaced 1 king
with several leaders. Now, a piece can't move until a leader 'tells' it
to. Coupled with short range pieces, leaders able to give orders only to
pieces they were near produced a very nice um, medium-sized [to me anyway]
12x16 game, Chieftain Chess [which by the way, is actually a shatranj
variant - it came directly from Lemurian Shatranj]. 
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/msdisplay.php?itemid=MSchieftainchess

Chief starts with 8 clans having just arrived at the edges of a large
field to do battle, 4 against 4. The players deploy the 2 armies and move
across the field, maneuvering to gain advantage in one area of the board or
another. Capture is the traditional FIDE capture by replacement - pieces
move onto enemy squares, and stop, removing the enemy pieces. All pieces
are clearly chesslike. But the character of the game has changed a bit:
instead of attacking 'through time', players attack 'across space'. A
typical chess game involves many attacks in a few areas that are carried
on, and calculated, across many turns. A Chieftain game features many
attacks across the entire board each turn, and these attacks generally last
only a few turns in time before the battle has swept away from that area to
someplace new. 

This is closer to a wargame, but there are 'flaws' in this chess
simulation of a wargame. By the end of the game, both armies are utterly
destroyed, with the winning player having between 2 and 6 pieces left, and
the loser, nothing. The game is also very unforgiving; get a single piece
down early, and that can easily cost you the game at the end. Now, this is
not a bad thing for chess. In fact, I suspect most good players would
appreciate knowing a game like this is all pure skill. Still, a wargame
features a little more flexibility. In Chief, losing 1 leader without
getting one of your opponent's means you will lose the game quickly,
'every' time. [Like blundering away your queen for nothing.] This is not
a feature of most battles. [But it is, fortunately, very much a feature of
a good chess game. For what it's worth, I can recommend Chieftain Chess as
a very nice and very different chess variant.]

This is already overlong, and there's more I'd like to say [you have
been warned!] so I'll continue with things that have and haven't worked,
or haven't worked yet, in another post.

I was trying to view chess (and chess variants) through the eyes of
wargames, using wargame terminology, rather than create a hybrid game.

Well, in viewing chess as a wargame, you may run into difficulties, unless
you are Bobby Fischer. For one thing, I make way too many pawn moves in the
opening, and this is the result of a wargame mentality. Further, when I
design, I tend to incorporate elements of wargaming, short range pieces
being the most obvious and ubiquitous. Chess and wargames can be viewed
under the same high-level concepts of tactics and strategy, but any
concepts except the highest, most abstract [and least practical] must be
different. Pawns may be analogous to trees, but only when Birnam Wood to
Dunsinane did go have we seen a forest march across the field. The
practical differences are like those between a mathematician and an
engineer. And the practical difference between your thought and mine is
that now you don't find out what I figure my failures were. That saves me
from embarrassment and you from boredom. ;-)