Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

I disagree on FRC and Switching, calling them instead Track One, but they
are both in the area of overlap. If there are 5000 CVPage CVs by now,
maybe 1500 are Track One (some are only Mutators), 3000 Track Two, and 500
both I and II like Switching. We would agree that your CV of decade Pocket
Mutation and my nominee Rococo would both fit here as Track Two.
Separately I look at Cannon as ''Hopper'' in follow-up. Is DWAF then
same as Mastodon?  Joyce says, ''that the pieces are so similar to the
western Rook and Bishop, are reasons why I believe they could be
acceptable to western players,'' referring to Eurasian and Jacks &
Witches Cannon and Canon. However, maybe that is exactly the flaw of
Xiangqi with both Cannon and Rook able to reach some very same squares. I am
going to run Track One up to at least year 2030, but let us organize this
wild-card track too.

How about we have a Track 1.5?  Or have some way to make it more granular?

The last stop on track 1 is games that introduce 2 new pieces, generally on
an 8x10 or 10x10 board. The 'traditional' chess expansions, the ones that
people do/will/may play, have only 2 pieces difference from western chess.
And these 2 pieces are additions to the standard KQRBNP, not replacements
for them, in general. Specifically, the variants of
Carrera-Capablanca-Grand Chess are the most likely form[s] of the 'next
chess'. Fergus Duniho's Eurasian Chess is an outlier of this 'last stop
for next chess' - the pieces that are acceptable are quite constrained.
The Amazon [QN] is too powerful for track 1; the [BN] and [RN] are
acceptable, and the Vao and Pao [Fergus' added pieces in Eurasian] are
also, but just barely. 

Once you get to 3 different pieces in a variant, there is no chance that
it will/could become 'the next chess'. From here on out, all stops are
on some spur of track 2, the 'non-serious' chess variants. [Need I say
that I find these far and away the most interesting? :-) ] None of these
games is trying to 'improve' or re-work western chess. They are flat-out
explorations of what chess[like] pieces and chess[like] rules are capable
of doing. 

And time has marched on, other comments are accumulating, so this ends in
a few sentences. As George has suggested, we can organize the wilder side
a bit. Patterns of design and new ideas are starting to emerge from the
fringes. This is where the adventure is. I'd like to map out a couple
paths to see in which directions they are going. [Btw, George, we both
agree, FRC or any 960 variant is a track 1, and probably the first thing
FIDE will actually try next - I'd listed Switching and Extinction as
track 2s. The impression I got from my 1 game of switching is that there
are no already-learned chess strategies you can apply to Switching, so I
figure it's too outre.]

Rich asks if there is a Track 1.5, between tracks 1 and 2. Well, that may
be somewhat debatable, but I'd like to walk down to the other end of the
platform, to Track 9&3/4. 

One of the 'fringe' areas in which I know of very little work being done
is that of 'giant' pieces. Koksal Karakus designed Giant Chess, which
uses a chesspiece [the Dev] that covers 4 squares on the board, in a 2x2
area. There is a wall piece that covers 2 adjacent squares. I'm sure
there are other such pieces, but here I'd like to consider a 'giant
chesspiece' that is composed of several common chess pieces. Unlike other
tries, this 'piece' has one unit that acts as the 'king' for the entire
multi-unit piece. Kill the 'king' and the 'piece' is dead, even if bits
of its corpse still remain [immobile] on the board. 

Call the king a brain unit, make a rule that no part [individual unit] of
the 'piece' can move without being in direct contact with the brain, use
3 or more different kinds of chesspieces as units, and you have a large
piece that can seem to move across the board almost like it was alive. 

Why bother? Well, it gives the concepts of chesspiece 'powers' and hit
points a whole new meaning. You want a piece that can attack at a
distance? Put bishops or rooks into it; they can 'fire' out of the piece
across the board to capture. They may well be 'one-shot' pieces if used
this way, but if you can pick off an enemy brain with one shot, and
without exposing your own brain units, it can be very worth it. As far as
'hit points', that's just the number of units in a piece. And power is
easily seen then as what kind of units are [remaining] in the multi-square
piece. 

To do this right needs big boards, which is why I suggested the 12x16
board. Because there are 2 levels of organization, there are 2 ways to
look at the number of chesspieces in the game. On the lower level, there
are 32 pieces per side. On the higher level, there are 4. Each of the 4 is
composed of about 8 units, is all. Enjoy.

Pocket Mutation and Rococo are excellent examples of track 2s, and both
appear among the all-time top 20 games played on Game Courier. Kudos to
their designers; they truly deserve it. Most of the games on that list
have quite a pedigree. There might well be some worthy candidates there
for our hypothetical next chess, too, but this is a track 2 discussion.
Lol, this is where the 10 or 15 of us who actually play/understand the
truly bizarre games hang out. But among all the really strange games, you
find some themes of interest popping up. 

Multi-move games in general are a bit of a curiosity, but not an area open
for any real design work, or at least this seems to be the case. Also in
looking through the listed multi-movers onsite, I noticed only the
'standard equipment 8x8' games have a multi-move tag in our submission
form. And several games listed as multi-mover are not. This has made it
difficult for me to fully research this topic. Pritchard's Classified
Encyclopedia of CVs has no different information than this site, and
googling provided other places with far less information. It's been an
hour since I started this paragraph, during which I re-googled and dug out
Pritchard and such and found nothing more. So here, I'm reduced to
asking:
Are there any more multi-move chess variants out there?

One I've learned about rather recently is Fred Lange's Megachess [not to
be confused with David Howe's Mega-Chess]. This is the only game I know of
[aside from several of my own] that uses the number of kings a player has
to determine the number of moves that player may make in a turn. I favor
this approach, because it gives an in-game rationale for number of moves
per turn, rather than using an arbitrary rule imposed from outside, like
the progressive chesses, for example. And it gives a basis for some very
interesting effects. At least, I think they're interesting; it remains to
be seen whether anyone else does. Guess I'll post some rules and see.

Rolling Kings is my number one multi-move CV indexed there. King moves in set pathway
each turn making for real nuisance. There are other multi-move tries
besides those indexed. Philosophers is not listed in index and becomes
multi-move vast majority of turns. Betza has multi-move articles that do
not get indexed under ''multi-move,'' as Betza's ''Monster Chess
variants.'' Oppositely, Betza's Lena Hau takes several turns to make
even one one-step. Other 'Track Two' candidates include Giant King,
Tetrahedral, AltOrthHex, Hanga Roa, Altair, Eight-Stone, Weave & Dungeon.