

Announcing Chess 2 - wrongc0ntinent
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2013/5/30/announcing-chess-2.html

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TillE
I get that the name is a cute joke, but adding hidden information is totally
contradictory to the core beauty of chess.

I took a quick look at the rules and it seems like an interesting game, but
from a game design perspective, it's a radical departure from vanilla chess.

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aqme28
And the need for memorization is pretty elegantly solved with Fischer Random
Chess.

And draws are only very common at high-level play. It's not even clear this
variant would solve that.

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Someone
Not clear, but I am wondering what that "a king crossing the middle line is a
win" rule will do.

I have suspicion that that can lead to very early wins. "Move pawn, then rush
king to fifth row" might be beatable, but I guess there are quite a few
"recklessly run for row 5, and just make it" paths in the search tree. An easy
way to counteract that may be bringing the queen and rooks into play early,
but I would exchange them and then start the race for row 5.

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Ygg2
Remove most draws by adding a secondary objective.

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Someone
Here's something that I think is in the spirit of the game and has a good
chance of working:

Frame the game as two armies racing to occupy an oasis (four center squares of
the board) in the desert. Consider that oasis occupied if either the enemy's
king is captured, or if your king can camp there for X moves (if your king can
camp there, the area can't be part of the front anymore, so it is truly yours)

I chose an oasis rather than a true stronghold such as a fort or castle
because a fort or castle would have to mean the introduction of separate rules
for attacks into and out of the stronghold (hm, that might be fun, too.
Consider a case where captures into the four center squares require the
capturer to have at least two means to make that capture.)

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LukeWalsh
A variant I really like is gothic chess. It basically adds two pieces to the
board. While traditional chess only has a bishop-rook piece (the queen),
gothic chess adds a bishop-knight and a rook-knight.

When I was younger I picked up a set at the USCF youth nationals chess
tournament, it is a fun break from regular chess because it gets you back to
thinking on your feet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_chess](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_chess)

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deletes
And here are chesses from 3 to infinity.

[http://www.chessvariants.org/alphabet.html](http://www.chessvariants.org/alphabet.html)

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jerf
Yes, I also found the claim on the name "Chess 2" vaguely annoying. I mean,
jeepers, just look at the S page, locked to "Games" only:
[http://www.chessvariants.org/index/mainquery.php?displayinve...](http://www.chessvariants.org/index/mainquery.php?displayinventor=1&displayauthor=1&itswhatsnew=&groupbyweek=&sortdescending=&daysyoung=&daysold=&orderby=LinkText&startswithletter=S&language=English&category=&type=Game)

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pervycreeper
I miss sites like that. Thanks for the nostalgia.

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zem
same here. inspired in large part by
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-t...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-the-
year-the-stream-crested/282202/) one of my planned projects for 2014 is to put
up a website with that 1990s sense of "jumping-off point for lots of
interesting stuff, according to me, your friendly curator and tour guide"

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adamconroy
Bah. There are hundreds of chess variants, to name yours chess 2 is extreme
misplaced arrogance. And more than likely it has a dominant strategy and is
flawed.

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semiel
I've followed Sirlin for a long, long time. He definitely has a ton of
misplaced arrogance (it's arguably his defining feature), but he is extremely
good at game balance. I'm sure there are flaws with Chess 2, but I highly
doubt that a dominant strategy is one of them.

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oelmekki
Chess 2. For me, it's called starcraft, and it already addresses all mentioned
problems.

Nevertheless, I applaud game designer to have the balls to try to evolve
something so established. Loving chess a lot, I'll certainly give that a try.

~~~
tinco
Although Starcraft 2 comes close, Blizzard still has not solved the problem of
realtime strategy games being too hard to control to allow it to really be
about strategy and tactics, and perhaps they don't want to either.

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oelmekki
I beg to differ :)

Maybe it's the case at the beginning, when realtime can be overwhelming, but
at higher level, people have a lot of different tactics, be it build orders
(like chess openings), general game flow and timing, specific offensive
tactics (there are actually so many that getting information about what your
opponent is doing is one of the most critical part of the game) and choosing
army composition based on opponent's one weak points.

As for strategy, I think fast decision making should be considered in the
field of strategy too : you have to act quick while still following a bigger
plan, and be quick to change it in case of problem. After all, nobody would
say blitz chess games are not about strategy. But yes, it can feel totally
random for casual players, just like blitz chess.

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tinco
You say higher level like it's something that's attainable by simply playing a
bit more often but actually you mean 'highest'. A level of skill with
manipulating units that's only attained by 0.0001 of Starcraft players, it is
not something people suffer from 'at the beginning'. It's a skill that's
generally thought not to be attainable or even sustainable past the age of 30.

I am not debating whether Starcraft has strategy, tactics or whether fast
decision making is a cool element of a game. I think it's all true. It's just
that in Starcraft those things are all only relevant when you're better at
manipulating units than your opponent is.

It's what makes Starcraft more a sport than a game.

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cju
My favorite variant is Twilight Chess [1]:" The general idea of twilight chess
is fairly simple : you can move any of your piece, but the king, into a
twilight zone (warp moves), and any piece on the twilight zone may be moved to
any empty square of the board (drop moves), but pawns on the last rank. "

[1]: [http://membres-
lig.imag.fr/prost/Twilight_Chess/index.html](http://membres-
lig.imag.fr/prost/Twilight_Chess/index.html)

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toolslive
`Chess 1` has been tweaked over the centuries as well: castling and en-passant
are quite recent.

As to memorization of openings, the current world champion Magnus Carlsen
thinks the attention to opening theory is overrated.

The only thing that really bothers me is that an opponent can continue to play
a position that's obviously lost for a number of hours. I think adding the
concept of a doubling cube (like in Backgammon) might address this.

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V-2
_castling and en-passant are quite recent._

They're not, really. They date back to middle ages. Quite recent is only that
they were made "official" and rules were uniformized.

 _As to memorization of openings, the current world champion Magnus Carlsen
thinks the attention to opening theory is overrated._

Yes, but you need to know the context in which he thinks it's "overrated" :)

It's not unusual these days that more than half of the game is prepared at
home.

Eg. when Topalov played Anand in World Championship 2010, Anand lost the first
game, because he forgot the correct 23rd move of his home preparation. The
game went on for 7 more moves.

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jimrandomh
The rules link goes to a checkout process meant for selling things, with the
price set to zero. It has required-fields for billing address (even though it
doesn't collect actual payment information). Then it emails (to mailinator, in
my case) an order confirmation email, followed by a separate shipping
confirmation email (shipped to empty-string). It didn't send an actual
download link, though.

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kosei
Interesting variant, but it still bothers me that he made it to set out to
help solve the problem of experts, most of whom will never play this game. One
of the biggest reasons it was created was to solve the issue of constant draws
at the highest tier. Seems like it would be more advantageous to target such a
game to amateur and intermediate chess players.

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derefr
You have to design mainly for high-level play; otherwise you get a game that
people try, maybe play a few times, but that nobody sticks with long enough to
cycle around to evangelizing it and training the next generation in it.

For a flash-in-the-pan iOS game title, that might be okay, but if you're
actually trying to reinvent something like _chess_ \--something with hundreds
of generations of people who have come into a thriving "chess culture" and
added their own contributions to it--then you have to aim high.

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siddboots
Okay, I might be crazy, but this reads like a clever satire on the tendency of
gaming companies to release sequels with new "features" at the expense of
game-play.

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based2
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightmare_Chess](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knightmare_Chess)

