All of MattArnold's Comments + Replies

Just a note to confirm that we are also meeting on Saturday, October 9 at 8pm at Tenacity Craft!

I just now realized that the day and time never made it on to this page. That's my fault; I sent it to the coordinator too late, and failed to notice it wasn't on the event page. It will be 8pm, Saturday September 18. I hope you can still make it!

1MattArnold
Just a note to confirm that we are also meeting on Saturday, October 9 at 8pm at Tenacity Craft!

Yeah, The Duke is pretty interesting. Along the same lines, look at Onitama.

Setting aside my intrinsic love for board games, the aspect of this discussion which fascinates me the most from a Less Wrong perspective is the use of words and categories. How do we arrive at a distinction between whether games are "variants" or "in the same family"?

Each category has strongly-bound traits and weakly-bound traits, such as "a matrix of regularly-spaced locations where game materials can be positioned". Even the category of abstract games has traits bound to it, like deterministic non-randomness.

Almost twenty years ago, I made several custo... (read more)

I'm interested in your concept of Chess feeling like it's complete, as if it has completed a platonic solid. You remedied its incompletions with the Cardinal and Marshal, but Omega Chess attempts to fill in the lack of leapers by introducing the Champion and Wizard. The design of Omega Chess was similarly motivated by this sense of completion, but it seems its design locates the gaps in different places from where the design of Grand Chess locates the gaps. Did you consider this? And how did you come to this conclusion?

2MikkW
I don't really feel like the Champion and Wizard are "missing pieces" the same way the Cardinal and Marshal are. There are a practically infinite number of pieces that could possibly exist, so I'd expect most possible pieces are not included in the game (Betza's Chess with Different Armies is a nice exploration of this). Omega chess doesn't even feel particularly complete- where are the pieces that can move exactly 1 square orthogonally or diagonally? If a champion is to rook as the wizard is to bishop, what is the knight to? I feel the correct completion of that is the knightrider, but there is no knightrider in the game. And we still have this weird gap where we have rook + bishop = queen, but rook + knight and bishop + knight are missing. While I expect that most possible pieces will be missing from any variant, I happen to agree with Capablanca and Freeling that the lack of marshal and cardinal in orthodox feels weird. In orthodox, the queen is a strange wildcard that is unlike any other piece, whereas in grand chess the queen, cardinal, and marshal make a nice set, naturally extending the knights, bishops, and rooks. Beyond any considerations of completeness, I also just feel more excited about the Cardinal and Marshal than most other variant pieces. They feel like fireworks to me, and I'd prefer a game with them over a game with a few new weaker pieces