Introducing the Variants World
Hello everyone!
We've had a long journey of Custom Variants growth and development. Did you know that almost all variants available at chess.com/variants were made by community members? But did you know that the Custom Games Admin Team has reviewed over 1000 new variant submissions? And these are only the ones available in our databases, in fact this number is much higher (~1500), since when it all started there wasn't any recording of reviewed submission made.
We've been always using the Custom Variants (formerly, Custom Positions) club forum for posting and reviewing new submissions, but keeping track of everything, including requirements for submission, got more and more complicated over time.
We've gone through using 4 different versions of CGABot (each of which was made from scratch) who helped us a lot by automating the routine process.
We are now announcing the transition to a new platform for official submitting your new creations! It is a special forum-like app that was made for Variants specifically.
There are a lot coming more there soon, including notifications, user profiles, Wheel of Fortune variants collection, and potentially the Variants Wiki project that has been developed by one of the community members for while. So make sure you don't miss anything!
Join the variants.world today!
And thank you all for your creativity and keeping Variants interesting and exciting!
Q: I am new to variants, what are custom variants, what does it mean to submit?
A: Variants has build-in tools allowing anyone to create their own unique chess variants with custom boards, pieces, and rules. Whenever you create your own chess variant and would like it to be included to the official list of variants or to the WoF rotation, you should submit your variant for review by the CGA Team, who then thoroughly tests its quality, balance and uniqueness, and decides whether to add it or not.
Q: What will happen to previous submissions I made?
A: We will do our best to move all the previous submissions we recorded for the past 3 years to the new app very soon. Currently we moved all submissions for the past 3 months from the forum manually, and we will update the dates and the authors accordingly as soon as the actual authors join the variants world.
Q: What will happen to the Custom Variants club?
A: We will keep it for sharing ideas (not submissions) of new variants. Until now, we've been redirecting all ideas posted to a special thread. But there are a lot of downsides of this decision, we acknowledge it, and now we are finally free to change it.
Q: How do I submit a new variant now?
A: Play at least 9 testing games and start typing their numbers or pasting links to them directly to the input fields. The rules are displayed, an image is generated, and the requirements are being checked on the fly!
