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40oz

Chess 2: the Sequel to Chess

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Full Article here

Really interesting stuff. A guy famous for rebalancing Ken, the most powerful character in Street Fighter 2 for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix has created a new, more fast paced and less memorisation-intensive version of Chess that is able to be played with a traditional chess board. It focuses on making the game enjoyable for beginners but more importantly, still entertaining for masters. The major flaws being addressed are it's reliance on memorizing sequences of moves to win, the way the game drags at the end when one player is desperately playing defensively, and the 60% rate that a game ends in a draw. The major changes involve a variety of starting arrangements for your army to pick from, each offering different advantages and disadvantages in play. A new condition for winning in which a player wins for having his/her King cross over the halfway point of the board. And a new game mechanic called "Dueling" in which a player can threaten to take one of the opponents piece after the first player's piece has been captured by doing a rock-paper-scissors type thing.

There's supposed to be a video game coming out for it in the near future so that people can play it without having to refer to the rulebook the whole time. I'm not much of a chess player but I'm really intrigued by the idea of making a few changes to Chess in order to lessen the frequency of the game ending in a draw, have more climactic endings to a game, and make it less dependent on memorization. And it doesn't introduce anything too weird like a different shaped board, or new pieces. Just some new rules and game mechanics.

What do you think?

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It seems like heresy to try and improve something that is already considered perfect. I'm pretty sure this is just a ploy to raise demand for Chess Classic, but with slightly altered ingredients.

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The basic premise is false.

At practically every point in its history there have been some people claiming that chess needs to be altered due to "draw death" or "too much opening theory". This was particularly prevalent in the 1920s, believe it or not. But at each point players have turned out to be perfectly happy with the game as it stands.

Modern chess is played in a more combative way than at most previous periods, and there has been a distinct move away from extremely deep opening theory, with players finding all sorts of interesting deviations at early move-numbers. The very richness of the game saves it from the problems that its accusers tout. Those "problems" themselves aren't an issue for many players either - many relish the scientific aspect.

It's always possible to think up interesting-sounding variants, but that is all most of them tend to remain. Even small changes are liable to disrupt the delicate balance which is fundamental to the game's basic appeal. This may not be obvious to those who are familiar with the game at a novice level, but will become apparent as they gain more experience with chess.

As for games dragging on too long, given that so many games are played nowadays with a time-limit of 3 or even 1 minute for all the moves, I'm not quite sure how to respond to this one...

Cumbersome additional rules also jeopardize one of the game's key attractive features: the fact that even very young children (i.e. an average three-year-old) can learn the basic rules.

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David Sirlin is an interesting guy. He REALLY LIKES certain game mechanics, especially ones that involve trying to figure out what your opponent is thinking, and REALLY DISLIKES others, particularly memorization. In general I like Sirlin's games but he approaches game design like some ideas are objectively better than others and seems baffled about why people would disagree with him. He does make a pretty good case for the things he likes, but some people just aren't going to go for it.

I haven't actually had a chance to play Chess 2, it looks pretty fun, but it's quite a different beast from Chess. I can see that most people who are happy with Chess as it is probably wouldn't like it, and the fact that he calls his variant "Chess 2" isn't going to win him any friends from that crowd.

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I defer to Grazza's expert judgment on this, but as someone who has recently been trying to learn to play Chess a bit better, I have to admit that I do find the whole opening theory part incredibly daunting. It's kind of annoying that to learn to play effectively you need to study these hundreds of different openings, and it feels a bit like it "cheapens" the game as well: instead of being about skill it's how many of these openings you've studied and memorised.

Bobby Fischer's Chess960 is quite interesting for this reason: it breaks the fixed opening layout and randomises it instead. It sounds like "Chess 2" tries to solve the same problem, but overall this new variant sounds a bit like a gimmick.

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I also hated having to study lots and lots of openings and that's what pretty much made me quit Chess. When I got to participate in a somewhat serious tournament and saw all these people making like first 15 moves very quickly, I realized that I just don't have the determination to study openings so much. I think I was 13 or 14 at the time.

Anyway, the name Chess 2 is very arrogant and lame imo, just like Plutonia 2, TNT 2, etc. :)

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Memfis said:

I also hated having to study lots and lots of openings and that's what pretty much made me quit Chess. When I got to participate in a somewhat serious tournament and saw all these people making like first 15 moves very quickly, I realized that I just don't have the determination to study openings so much. I think I was 13 or 14 at the time.


I think Chess does have real problems, openings being one of them, but it's such an institution, that to fix these problems you need a really conservative approach. Some problems might not even be fixable; some people wouldn't even call them problems. I played chess (not at any serious level) when I was much younger, opening moves is one of the things that's kept me from wanting to pick it up again.

Anyway, the name Chess 2 is very arrogant and lame imo, just like Plutonia 2, TNT 2, etc. :)


:D

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fraggle said:

I defer to Grazza's expert judgment on this, but as someone who has recently been trying to learn to play Chess a bit better, I have to admit that I do find the whole opening theory part incredibly daunting. It's kind of annoying that to learn to play effectively you need to study these hundreds of different openings, and it feels a bit like it "cheapens" the game as well: instead of being about skill it's how many of these openings you've studied and memorised.

It depends what level you are playing at, but unless you're already somewhere around reasonable/good club level (140 ECF / 1800 FIDE / 1900 USCF*), then you don't need to know much specific opening theory at all. It's more important to understand opening principles and to be familiar with just a few very basic sequences. Any knowledge beyond that won't be much use yet in any case, as your opponents generally will deviate from it at an early stage. If there are a number of specific sequences in the book you're learning from (such as there are in my own "Chess Openings for Kids"), then you should be viewing these as sample lines embodying ideas, rather than something to be memorized.

If you are already at or above reasonable club level, then the positive reason for examining specific opening sequences is that this is actually a very effective way to improve your game generally. A lot of important chess strategies spring from opening set-ups, and studying in them in a concrete setting is more immediately meaningful than doing so in isolation. This shouldn't be done as a memorization exercise. It should be more a matter of absorption: expose yourself to ideas and sequences and you learn more useful concepts, train your brain better in more transferable ways, and end up actually remembering more specific sequences too. I tend to liken it to the way you remember your way around your hometown; you do so by virtue of having travelled around it, not by memorizing a map.

Once you have a reasonable understanding of chess strategy in general, it is much easier to play the opening in a more improvised way.

* Note: ratings provided by online chess servers tend to be wildly unreliable; I'm talking about actual ratings from playing traditional competitive chess.

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There's a ton of Chess variants already out there. I don't see what's special about this one other than the name. I doubt any of these were made with the intention of replacing the original; they're probably just made as fun diversions.

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he approaches game design like some ideas are objectively better than others and seems baffled about why people would disagree with him.


Those are really two different problems linked by logical fallacies on either side of the argument. There are objectively better ideas in game design, but their very existence doesn't instantly nullify the value of other ideas; and that there is some value in lesser concepts doesn't mean no hierarchy exists in design choices.

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There are so many chess variants out there already like david_a said. Chess is a fantastic game and I have a feeling most people get frustrated before they ever develop a proper skill at it. It's not like Angry Birds.

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* Midline invasion -- why not. Could be interesting. There's a nice risk/reward approach here, as the king will generally be more exposed to checkmate threats if you move it toward the enemy.
* Army rosters which change how each piece behaves -- meh. This really depends on the exact rules for each army, but it seems a bit confusing and gimmicky.
* Duelling -- eww. Total gimmick. Introduces a completely separate mechanism and resource, with no representation on the board itself. Feels really tacked-on.


I'd say, take the randomization from chess 960 and chess 256, add midline invasion, and ditch the rest of chess 2. That'll give you a nicely unpredictable game without introducing weird gimmicks in the algorithms.

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I remember the chess instructors at the chess club I frequented as a boy frowned upon impromptu "speedchess" or other chess variant games organized in the club, so the "veteran" students waited until the instructor left (and only the guardian was left in the club) to begin smashing those chess clocks (I guess that's part of the reason such variant were formally forbidden, other than taking a shit on all the elaborate theory, openings etc.)

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david_a said:

There's a ton of Chess variants already out there. I don't see what's special about this one other than the name. I doubt any of these were made with the intention of replacing the original; they're probably just made as fun diversions.

These are fun to read about, although I've never played any of them. I particularly like the look of "Peasants' revolt" and Horde chess. Something about slaughtering an incoming mob of pawns seems oddly appealing.

Grazza said:

It depends what level you are playing at, but unless you're already somewhere around reasonable/good club level (140 ECF / 1800 FIDE / 1900 USCF*), then you don't need to know much specific opening theory at all. It's more important to understand opening principles and to be familiar with just a few very basic sequences. Any knowledge beyond that won't be much use yet in any case, as your opponents generally will deviate from it at an early stage. If there are a number of specific sequences in the book you're learning from (such as there are in my own "Chess Openings for Kids"), then you should be viewing these as sample lines embodying ideas, rather than something to be memorized.

If you are already at or above reasonable club level, then the positive reason for examining specific opening sequences is that this is actually a very effective way to improve your game generally. A lot of important chess strategies spring from opening set-ups, and studying in them in a concrete setting is more immediately meaningful than doing so in isolation. This shouldn't be done as a memorization exercise. It should be more a matter of absorption: expose yourself to ideas and sequences and you learn more useful concepts, train your brain better in more transferable ways, and end up actually remembering more specific sequences too. I tend to liken it to the way you remember your way around your hometown; you do so by virtue of having travelled around it, not by memorizing a map.

This is all really helpful information, and I'm nowhere near that level at all :) The impression I've got so far (from your comment and others) is that it does take a lot of both practise and study (of past games) to develop to a decent level. I'm at the level where it's difficult to even think about how to play strategically, as it's difficult to see past the individual pieces. I recently read a bit of Pawn Power in Chess which was interesting in terms of learning about pawn structure etc. But I'm still far from being able to look at things on a "higher level" which is a bit frustrating.

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Monopoly has struck gold by making new versions like Catopoly, Blackhawksopoly. Why can't Chess do the same? I shall call this new version 'Mess.'

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If you ask me, chess is perfect as it is. If somebody wants to try something different, they might as well try chessvariants.org]this. And while a lot of them are crap (something like an "idgames archive terry syndrome"), there are some of them worth looking at, like Baroque Chess, the already mentioned Bobby Fischer's Chess960, Alamos Chess, Shatranj (not really a variant, more like the opposite), etc. Not to mention Shogi or Xianqi (which, in turn, also have a number of variants). Or Rithmomachia, if you like medieval math. There's a whole world of chess out there.

By the way, if you want something crazy, take a look at this or this, but in my limited experience, the most interesting is Tenjiku Shogi.

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Gez said:

* Midline invasion -- why not. Could be interesting. There's a nice risk/reward approach here, as the king will generally be more exposed to checkmate threats if you move it toward the enemy.
* Army rosters which change how each piece behaves -- meh. This really depends on the exact rules for each army, but it seems a bit confusing and gimmicky.
* Duelling -- eww. Total gimmick. Introduces a completely separate mechanism and resource, with no representation on the board itself. Feels really tacked-on.


I'd say, take the randomization from chess 960 and chess 256, add midline invasion, and ditch the rest of chess 2. That'll give you a nicely unpredictable game without introducing weird gimmicks in the algorithms.


I pretty much agree. I like the different armies actually, and one thing Sirlin is very good at is balancing rosters. But they are balanced for the Duelling mechanism, which feels very un-chess like, plus I don't really see a lot of serious chess players going for an asymmetric game like that. Midline invasion seems like a sure win to me, though I'm interested to hear arguments against it.

I hope people actually read that article, even if you think Chess 2 is silly and unnecessary it brings up a few interesting points. Some choice quotes:

"There's a lot of pride for the current game amongst the intermediate level in the game. If you ask a grandmaster, they're well aware of the problems, but at the intermediate level you get a lot of, 'This is perfect! How dare you?'"

"The problem of draws is very well-known," he tells me over email. "If I were to make a completely new competitive game, then tell you that over 60 per cent of games played by experts ended in draws, and it takes like an hour to play, it would be rejected right away as a competitive game I think. At the very least, it would be a bad property that you'd want to fix. That's one issue with chess, though, and it seems to have gotten more extreme over time."

"A lot of grandmasters have created their own variants. Chess 2 is the first one I know of that really looked at the game critically and asked: what are the problems that need to be addressed and how can we answer those problems? A lot of chess variants exist, I think, because of the first idea that popped into someone's head. Oh, let's do three-player chess, a circular chess board. This one really stands out as having come from a critical background."


Of course they are trying to sell you something, so I guess that needs to be kept in mind.

The rules can be downloaded here if anyone wants to scrutinize them:
http://www.sirlingames.com/products/chess-2-print-and-play

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fraggle said:

These are fun to read about, although I've never played any of them. I particularly like the look of "Peasants' revolt" and Horde chess. Something about slaughtering an incoming mob of pawns seems oddly appealing.

I thought the idea behind Arimaa was pretty neat - after the Deep Blue / Kasparov games, somebody decided to make a game that humans could easily play but that AIs would have a horrible time with.

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geo said:

Monopoly has struck gold by making new versions like Catopoly, Blackhawksopoly. Why can't Chess do the same? I shall call this new version 'Mess.'


Well it probably wouldn't take too much to convert all the chess pieces into little cats now, would it? Might as well go with it. The thing with all the 'opolies though is that it's pretty much always the same game, just with new pieces, cards, and locations to buy. There may be a little variation here and there (Dinosaur Monopoly Jr for example has big ass Dino cards instead of property cards, and you can't build hotels or houses). Chess 2 seems like a huge quote on quote "step forward". Granted, I don't think Chess is owned by any one company, but with that, then, you think the market would be flooding with CHess boards and cat pieces.

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geo said:

Monopoly has struck gold by making new versions like Catopoly, Blackhawksopoly. Why can't Chess do the same? I shall call this new version 'Mess.'


Did it? The only ones I found truly original worth the time to play (and somewhat challenging) were Aero-monopoly (where you managed landing rights rather than properties, and had a few twist across the board), and anti-monopoly (where the objective was to LOSE all of your money).

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Gez said:

* Midline invasion -- why not. Could be interesting. There's a nice risk/reward approach here, as the king will generally be more exposed to checkmate threats if you move it toward the enemy.
* Army rosters which change how each piece behaves -- meh. This really depends on the exact rules for each army, but it seems a bit confusing and gimmicky.
* Duelling -- eww. Total gimmick. Introduces a completely separate mechanism and resource, with no representation on the board itself. Feels really tacked-on.


I'd say, take the randomization from chess 960 and chess 256, add midline invasion, and ditch the rest of chess 2. That'll give you a nicely unpredictable game without introducing weird gimmicks in the algorithms.


This is exactly my take on Chess 2. Exactly! Amazing. The only other thing I'll note is that Chess 2 removes stalemates, replacing them with automatic losses for the trapped player, which makes sense to me. It gives aggressive players another win condition over excessively defensive players. I guess another option would be to make stalemates an automatic win for the matee, but that's basically how they're treated now. Ha ha, at least I didn't lose!

If I was in David Sirlin's position I'd just be happy to know that people are thinking about my rule changes and mixing-and-matching. He probably knows that most people don't want bluffing and auctions in their game of chess, but nobody else was going to bring up the idea so I guess he had to. I think the central tenet here is that games shouldn't be considered unalterable, Platonic forms. There's nothing more to a game than how you play it.

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