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Your game is a gedanken-experiment- charles cameron's chess
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Your game is a gedanken-experiment- Charles Cameron's chess

I don't know if I told you, but the other day at the bus stop I was thinking that two ranks of pawns will always have a tough time defeating two rows of power pieces.
This led me to the thought that any newly designed chess variant will inevitably need its forces to work with one another in an appropriately "balanced" manner, and that tweaking the powers of those forces (adding or subtracting features like the pawn > queen transofrmation, or the castling power of rooks and kings) will almost certainly be needed to assure this balance.

What this means to me:

Your game is a gedanken-experiment about the nature of conflict. Its balance may need to be "tuned" for extended play -- but the notion embodied in the experiment is clear even if no playing is ever done. Your opening board, in a sense, says more than actual played instances ever can...

It's the intentional analogy with life that carries the strength of your idea.

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And so to an experiment of my own, still at the bus stop, intended not so much for play as for the suggestion of moral agents acting at cross purposes to both sides of a conflict...

I wondered what a chess game would be like if the bishops on both sides were out in front of their pawns at startup, and if the rules specified that the player whose turn it is must first see if either of his bishops can intervene in such a way as to avoid the loss of a piece currently in threat -- regardless of which side the piece thus saved is on -- and make that move is one exists. And only if no piece is in threat may the player chose a ("normal") move with the intent of winning the game...

Bishops thus functioning as moral agents, cutting across battle lines in pursuit of a goal that is perhaps pacifist or at least Red Cross like...

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