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.
The median Fischer Random starting position is considerably more boring than normal chess. The minor pieces are often distant and the rooks and pawns get in the way of everything. This isn't just familiarity speaking; in real chess rook-and-pawn positions with inactive minor pieces are considered extremely boring.
Also, there is no such thing as a "solved problem" in the design of complex systems.
Not only at (very) high-level play, but also at normal time control. I seriously doubt if a typical player would play Chess 2 taking 1.5 hour for his first 40 moves, as professional chess players do... In speed chess there's obviously more mistakes, and thus considerably less draws, even among grandmasters.
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.
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.)
Not to mention turning game balance on its head. In that sense, chess today is kind of like what Starcraft 1 would be, if it was played for another 500 years, all the while being constantly re-balanced. You can't just add 5 new races to the game and expect it to work out perfectly.
The only reason that chess is balanced today is that the teams have the same pieces. Any game would be balanced if the board is symmetric and both sides pieces are the same. The issue is who goes first.
You can't just add 5 new races to the game and expect it to work out perfectly.
Agreed, however it may make it more interesting to a lot of people.
If balance is only about equal chances, then chess actually rates poorly - White wins about 1/3 more often than Black. War (the card game) or rock-paper-scissors can both boast a considerably better balance :)
So if we talk about balance in chess, I think we mean something deeper than your view of the concept: the harmony between its different aspects, like attack vs defence, strategical vs tactical thinking, calculation vs aesthetics etc.
More like balance in art.
A "well-balanced painting" is not simply the most symmetrical one :) That's the easiest thing to achieve, but that's not the point, I believe
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.
same here. inspired in large part by http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/2013-t... 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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. "
`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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.