Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I see that some of us have no sense of humour.

Not all of my games are jokes, you know. I follow some design principles, analyze the rules, and play out the opening, usually. Some of my games have been rated very well. Zillions does not play well in many games, and is unnatural to program with non-Chess mechanics.

What this CV does is try to level the field of division between pieces and mutators. Are they really distinct, pieces and mutators? Invention, discovery or even reuse of a piece should dictate its own proper mutator(s). And conceiving a mutator ought to draw on only certain appropriate pieces, very limited in number, in turn. Humour? Not playing the CVs? Get real. Ralph Betza, the absolute best at CVs after Thomas Raynor Dawson, indicated specifically, I would say, 25% of the time he has not played his article's CVs, all 200 basic ones of them. 99% of CV material is not serious stuff but artwork, pure and simple, enjoyable, aesthetic artwork, impossible to be played widely. Betza's every article is nuanced toward amusement and humour, even his important piece-value attempts. Oldtimer Dawson's (1889-1951) very substantial studies of problem themes outside of OrthoChess are laced with entertainment. That is exactly where Fairy Chess embarks over a century ago, putting the fun back into Chess and taking the grim reality out of oddball chess inventions, the ''CVs'' of their time, before they were called CVs, such as Ben Foster's Chancellor Chess, commercially presented. The more important sideline, since Capablanca, is Track One OrthoChess replacement, transcending the bombast of boring GMs and wornout Fide Chess. V.R. Parton: entertaining foremost, having playability secondarily. Gridlock: satire. Stanley Random: sarcasm. ''91.5 Trillion...'': trying to be serio-comic after Betza's style with leaning toward genuine research. Gilman's every article, 1 to 200: irony and understatement. Editor Glenn Overby: humour in wild combinations of pieces. Lavieri: funny complexity worth playing. Smith's style is succinct and almost automatically playable, in some subvariants, because of good grounding in prior art. This Weak Combo and Strong Combo reminds me precisely of an Overby set of pieces implemented -- why I mention his particular orthogonal artwork. Did Overby playtest Beautiful Sun Chess, a mix of pieces reminiscent of these? Not likely much, but it is pretty work to behold momentarily, as art.

If I didn't mistake your comment, I would say that I thoroughly agree. Fergus says himself that his Shatranji is a better game than Chessgi.