Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

A short answer to your main question, from the front page: "This site seeks to catalog the vast number of Chess variants created throughout history, as well as to nurture the creation of new variants."

This site is not just for hobbyists and inventors of new variants, but for those who may want to find a variant to play (and often, for them to play those variants here).

The Recognized Variants are a good starting point for someone interested in variants. I think it natural then to keep its size somewhat limited.

As for a more in-depth listing, our Favorites page is a great place to look.

I'm definitely in favor of quality control. The question is whether that
is the responsibility of the editors or the creators. This site has taken a
laissez faire approach to this, placing that responsibility on the
creators. Some people care to create the best Chess variants they can, and
others care to churn out one game after another without considering
quality.

The Recognized Variants was an early effort to direct visitors to some of
the better-regarded and higher quality variants. This mainly reflected the
opinions of Hans Bodlaender and David Howe. I contributed a bit to this and
then opened it up to the larger body of users by conducting polls for
adding new variants to the list.

I have since abandoned adding to the Recognized Variants list in favor of
writing a script for letting all users pick their favorite variants and
then ranking them by popularity. I favor this for being more democratic.
You can help promote the variants you consider best by picking them as your
favorites. And if your favorite variants include some of your own, it's
perfectly alright for you to favorite them. I have favorited some of my own
games, and I consider favoriting your own games as a sign that you think
well of your own work.

I am all for the democratic process, but the problem is that it seems to
lacks accessibility. I know no other way into the variant descriptions on
this site than the alphabetical index, or occasionally the comments
listing, when someone happened to comment on one of the variants. The
alphabetical index just floods you with variants all presented on an equal
basis, except for the old, undemocratically chosen recognized variants, which are more prominently listed.

It would be nice if there was a sort of summary page where one could see an
overview of the results of the democratic process. Like "Hottest
variants". Where some 50 variants are ranked by the appreciation they
received, according to some formula that pays attention to average rating,
number of ratings, number of ratings/time. That would also encourage the
democratic process, as variants that attract more attention through an
unjustly high rating are more likely to see this corrected by people
disappointed in them.

To this I can add that it is not an uncommon phenomenon that designers of
Chess variants think their own variant is the best invention since
chocolate. And that I would never bother to even look at a game description
that does not even show a diagram of the initial setup. And that my own interest in Chess variants is mostly triggered by what the capabilities are of pieces with unorthodox moves. So I would quickly discard a variant that only used orthodox pieces as 'just another FIDE'.

Go to the heart image in the menu and select "Favorites Page". Maybe I
could change that to read "Our Favorite Variants", which may make it
clearer what it is. This page lists the results in ranked order of the
favorite games selected by our members. When you are on a game page, you
can use this same menu to select it as one of your favorites.

It does not handle rating of games. It is strictly about giving recognition
to favorite variants rather than evaluating less favored variants.

As a variant designer, I will add that when you have invented enough games,
you will have favorites among your own games, and you will be critical of
some of your past games instead of thinking each one is the best new
variant. When someone has invented a lot of games, I really want to know
which ones are his favorites, and that's one of the purposes behind the
Favorites system.

I have checked out the favourites page...its a decent addition.

I would say I am quite critical of my own games, which is why I have contributed so few.

Minima is just a compaction of Maxima fused with Ultima. I would say its a very nice addition to the group, but I wouldn't claim it be anywhere near as groundbreaking as Abbotts original.

Abalonian Chess is just a fusion of Chess and Abalone. Its probably the weakest of my variants.

Pawns Vault Chess has a nice gimmick and is quite colourful though again I've made no claims about it being particularly special.

Relay Chess is I maintain is one of the fundamental variants in that it is a "flattening" of the concept of the popular Knights Relay. However this was just a chance discovery. I wouldn't even consider it "my" game.

For Chess 256, I completely overwrote two previous games as I considered them too low quality for the concept, even though they were probably still good enough to be contributed as separate games.

HG Muller, 

yes certainly it would be nicer to be able to easily parse variants in
other ways, such as board shape, size, material type, piece density,
objectives etc.

My own games lack presentation, however I would say it is a general
problem. In an ideal world, one would be able to click on a game and not
only have images, but some form of interaction, perhaps even auto generated
games, though of course thats easy for me to say, as I have no part in the
building of the site...

As far as games with orthodox material being uninteresting, I would argue
that a game on a 16*16 board with added mechanics is a much bigger
departure from FIDE Chess than a slightly enlarged version with alternate
pieces, though perhaps thats a matter of taste...

Theres also ease of understanding to consider...

As far as "hottest" variants, sadly I'm not sure the site generates
enough traffic, or arguably as much traffic as it could.

The overwhelming popularity of chess dot com (and chess itself of course)
shows that a potential audience type is there. However there seems to be a
dogmatism in the FIDE community.

I proposed what was I viewed was a logical refinement to the stalemate rule
on the site forum (stalemate with pieces vs a bare king is a win) and was
universally shot down.

I'm not sure a "killer app" for chess variants is even possible, however
the modest popularity of certain variants such Fischer Random Chess at
least shows the most likely way of achieving it-games that evolve the chess
concept with some additional mechanic at low cost to rule complexity or
game symmetry, rather than a mere sideways alternation of it.

Of course the Purpose discussion has been held off and on. The leading CV
designer Ralph Betza on related thinking your own first or second CV is the
best ever is in his comment about Chess Different Armies:
http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=614.
Ironically he then goes on to say there Chess Different Armies ought to
replace  boring f.i.d.e. chess.

Other purposes to make and display CVs have evolved or self-organized for
example pure artwork or case of Gridlock pure amusement.  USA GM (of problems) Vukcevich saw the ultimate replacement by sorting purpose just as Betza: http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=18909 and http://www.chessvariants.org/index/displaycomment.php?commentid=18727.  As far as Luken's "dogmatism," it is appallingly shabby that supposed leader gm Seirawan expresses surprise or even skepticism that Centaur(bn) and Champion(rn) are 400 years old in early 17th century cv, when he writes about his unimaginative Seirawan Chess.  Ignorance of their own history describes most grand-masters.  That's another implicit purpose CVPage and offshoot sites, just to tell the true history.

Well, it is probably just because I am stupid, but it never occurred to me that this image would actually be a menu item. In fact I never noticed it at all, and even when you pointed it out, I had a hard time finding it.

I think it would be really useful to also make this page reachable from the 'Games' menu, because this is where I would expect it. I think that menu ought to start with

• Alphabetical Index
• Advanced Search
• Recognized
• Our Favorites

I have followed something along the lines of your suggestion. I have put a
link to "Our Favorites" in the Games menu. I migrated "Your Favorites"
to that menu and put it at the top, followed by "Our Favorites." "Your
Favorites" will show up only if you have favorited some games. I have also
changed the heart menu to show up only on game pages.

It would not be perfect ven in this. For one thing it would presumably not apply to pre-PYO pages such as my Great Herd. We're probably stuck with that forever just as we are with the pages for which I have posted updates that no editor has time to update. For another it might mean the loss of some pages whose virtues take time to become apparent. If a self-delete had been available at the time when I posted I'm a Wazir... I might well have dropped it as soon as it had been indexed with a bowdlerised introduction. Not well thought out, not very chess-like, theme-heavy, offensive title, it had nothing going for it in my mind at the time. Yet somehow it proved surprisingly playable. Even so, I think that a self-delete would be a move in the right direction.

A stopgap might be to fix it so that changing the title of a PYO page feeds through immediately to indexing so that it appears under the new name. Occasionally I replace a panned variant with something that I hope will go down better, but the change dpoeas not register in indexing until an editor intervenes. Thus for a while the page of my modest variants was indexed as Voyager, the single unsatisfactory theme-heavy variant that that family of games replaced.