Guest Post: On The Nature of Chess Variants

TheSeventhCinnabon is an avid bughouse enthusiast who has played bughouse on FICS for over thirty years and is sometimes rated over 2500. He occasionally rages at "noobs", especially those who "sacsit" right out of the opening. Like many bughouse players, his name is a strange and unexplained reference to a food item seemingly chosen at random. He is, in his own words, very bad at tactics, and approaches the game in a very philosophical way. I reproduce some excepts here, in the hope that you will read the rest and provide feedback in the comments. The link to the full original will be posted at the end.

On The Nature of Chess Variants

Preliminary Remarks

1. When enquiring into the nature of a game, it is first necessary to analyze it into its constituent parts. The number of players of the game is the most fundamental part of the game's nature, since some games are 0-player, being developments of certain algorithms, like John Conway's game of life, and some are 1-player, like solitaire. There are many games in which two players and more.

1.1. In the case of games for two and more players, these games may be cooperate or adversarial. With games like four player chess, there may be both cooperative and adversarial elements, which are often in flux. In some versions of four player chess, the cooperative elements are stipulated in the rules, and they exist on a "lower level". In other versions, the cooperative elements are not stipulated, but they emerge out of strategic considerations. In both cases, the cooperative/adversarial distinction is fundamental, since one cannot understand what one is seeing without it. And it is not possible to play the game well without having a theory of mind, (thinking about the aims and goals of the other players in relation to each other) in addition to skill in maneuvering.

1.2. In classical chess there are both pieces and a board, which must be considered together. The identity of the pieces is for the most part fixed, and the board is always closed. (On cannot, for example, move a Knight from the a1 square to the g7 square.) The rules govern both the nature of the board and the pieces. Much of the time, the rules are not always explicitly stated, because the authors thought the rules too obvious to state, or because the game has too many properties to be explicitly stated. Interesting chess variants may occur when ordinary properties of chess are recognized. For instance the rule that the board is closed, or the rule that two pieces may not occupy the same square, there are no special squares (except those that are special in light of strategic considerations) and so on.

1.3. Games usually serve some function, which may be intellectual, aesthetic, social, or political. In some tellings, the game of Go was created by the advisor to a Chinese Emperor for the Emperor's unruly son, presumably to cultivate certain intellectual virtues such as foresight, patience, and tenacity. This being said, many players do not have firm opinions on the reason for their playing any particular game. They may say that a certain game is enjoyable, but this merely pushes the problem back a step. Of course, there is no reason that the motivations for designing and playing a game should be aligned. And there is no reason that a person's motivations for playing any particular game should remain the same over time. Many young children are first attracted to chess because of its imagery, and continue enjoying it because of the nature of the game. The game of Go is elegant looking, but it is really the rules and the structures that emerge which are the most rewarding to the mind.

1.4. Chess is in general enjoyable because of its depth. A game like tic-tac-toe is uninteresting because one can master it in a matter of minutes. Not only are there are a very limited number of variations, but they are all so similar in nature that there is nothing to engage the mind. If human beings were vastly more intelligent, they would find chess boring. The idea of a struggle presupposes some kind of limitation, and therefore the game must be deeper than the player for the game to be interesting to the player.

1.4.1. An infinitely intelligent person would not be interested in any game of complete information, no matter how vast, because all of the possible variations would be immediately present to them, just as all of the possibilities are immediately present to us when we play tic-tac-toe or some other simple game. There would be no problems for this person to solve. Moreover, there would not be better or worse moves; there would only be moves which lead to a win, moves which lead to a draw, or moves which lead to a loss. The idea of a "strong" move or of a "fighting" move is only applicable to players who are limited in vision.

...

On Change in Games

2. Chess originated in India, and underwent many changes. Many of these changes were augmentations of the movements of the pieces. The pawns were given the option to move two squares, the castling rule helps the King get safe, the en passant rule prevents the players from making the board too closed, without which one imagines the game would have been considerably more prone to draws. The reduction of draws helps to preserve the hierarchy of stronger and weaker players. When there are fewer draws, there is more scope for skill. Adjustments such as the augmentation of the Queen's movement help the flow of the game. The changes that were implemented over history were all good for the game.

2.1. Chess has become more uniform over time, since there are now standardized rules, guided by international federations which seek to make everything as explicit as possible. It is our contention that the newfound stasis of chess is in fact stagnation. Change is a vital aspect to the game, which has been lost.

2.2. Here we consider an objection. Are there not many well established variants, which are widely played and enjoyed? This is true--but only classical chess has a professional class; the variants are either non-professional or in the case of the variant Crazyhouse, semi-professional. Games must be realized by players, and in order for there to be players fully capable of realizing the depths of any given game, they must be able to devote a large degree of time to it. Even variants like chess 960 supervene on classical chess. For instance, a 960 tournament will have interest if the players are well-known in classical chess.

2.2.1. There are some players of chess variants who use various internet platforms such as Twitch.com and are able to generate some income. But until that income is top-down rather than bottom up, by which we mean until the money comes from collective rather than individual agents, those players are best understood as Twitch users who play a variant rather than variant players who use Twitch. It is really Twitch (or YouTube) which is doing the work, so to speak, rather than the variant.

2.3. There are a number of difficulties with classical chess, which have been noticed by earlier players, most importantly the 3rd world champion, Capablanca. Capablanca was concerned with the increasing development of chess technique, and with the increasingly drawish nature of the game. These are understandable concerns. Another concern is that the structures of the games are mostly familiar due to the heavily theory-laden openings, and this is borne out by contemporary games at the highest level.
...

2.7. There are many reasons why it is difficult to make changes. There is a long tradition, and a large literature, of great chess games. To simply append chess with a rule such as allowing the King to move two spaces instead of one, would break with a rich tradition without any clear gain. This game would be in many senses new, but it would be the same game in the most important respects.

2.7.1. There are perhaps hundreds of millions of chess sets around the world. There are standardized pieces and boards. It may be that Capablanca's variant was unfeasible simply because it departed too heavily from classical chess in a straightforward material sense. This may also be true of variants such as Omega Chess, which introduces a larger board and new pieces, and as far as we can see, is rich and interesting. This difficulty may be partly mitigated by digital software. For instance, it makes it much easier to play crazyhouse, which is rather clumsy in person, because one cannot change the color of a physical piece easily. (In Japanese chess, Shogi), this presents no problem because the pieces do not have colors, but their allegiance is represented by the direction in which they are pointed).

2.7.2. The other obvious reason is that standard chess has a hierarchy which might be upset by any amendment to the game. But in spite of this, there does seem to be a growing pluralistic attitude to chess.

2.7.3. Classical chess enjoys the natural advantage of evolution--small adjustments over time. And classical chess has a certain harmony which it would be exceedingly difficult to imitate by creating an entirely new game from scratch. But this is not to say that whatever survives is therefore best--since there are many competing pressures on which rule sets prevail--and many of these are not at the level of the games themselves--consider the money which goes into regular chess, which allows the very strongest players to be respectably wealthy.

...

Miscellaneous Notes

5. The variants may present interesting problems--even problems which classical chess never anticipated. For instance, Judo Chess, (formerly called Tempest Chess) allows the player to move every piece, whenever they want to, with the proviso that that same piece cannot move again until a timer (digitally) attached to that piece has been depleted. This creates a peculiar sort of struggle, which is partly physical--one must be physically very deft and swift with the computer mouse--but still partly strategic and tactical. Four player chess and bughouse introduce social elements into the game, transforming what was formerly a prima facie insulated game into one which emphasizes teamwork, mutual support, and communication.

5.1. Variants which employ the piece drop appear to take some inspiration (whether consciously or not) from Go, in which every piece is dropped and nothing moves. These variants may be considered combine the virtues of chess and Go, since the pieces dropped at not, like Go, homogeneous in nature.

5.2. As noted above, interesting variants arise when the players change (intentionally or not) hitherto unnoticed properties of classical chess. By far the most interesting case is in bughouse, in which time is brought into the foreground. Since it is always necessary to have more time than one's opponent's partner, the strength of any given move depends not only on the positions on the board, but on the clock. This was not likely to have been the intention of the creators of the game--that would be putting the cart before the horse. However this is a double edged sword, since human beings frequently play nonsensically when they are low on time, and bughouse must be played at a low time control in order to function as a game (unless some as yet undiscovered mechanism is discovered). The frenetic time-scrambles of bughouse is perhaps what makes it unpalatable to chess teachers, wholly apart from the different set of patterns a bughouse player learns, which are also disorienting from the aspiring chess player. One can see that there are more than abstract considerations governing the popularity of these games--bughouse is often considered disreputable because chess is, in the public eye, supposed to be solitary, silent, and non-physical.

5.3. It is frequently wondered how bughouse affects chess, but not the reverse. In general, a bughouse player should try to avoid classical chess, since the patterns can confuse a bughouse player. In addition, the time spent playing one game of classical chess can be spent playing perhaps one hundred games of bughouse. In actual fact, bughouse has many purely abstract virtues which are not enjoyed by chess. The two boards are closed, but mutually constraining. There are no endgames, and there is no English Opening. And the game cultivates patience, since at the highest level, the material needed to win is almost never coming from the other board, and one must be resourceful and inventive.

5.4. In four player chess, where it is every person playing for themselves, an irresolvable paradox arises. (It arises in any three or more player game of complete information.) If a player plays too strongly, it is in the other player's best interests to work together against that player. If a player plays too passively, they risk falling behind and being unable to recover. The paradox is that there is often no best move. This is a difficulty, but not only a difficulty. There is value in having to deal with this problem.

5.5. In light of recent computer advances (by which I mean that any human being competing with a computer in classical chess is swiftly and mercilessly annihilated), the it seems likely that the successor to chess, if there ever is one, will have some kind of higher-level property which makes it immune from brute force calculation. However, it is not possible to predict what the successor to chess will be without first inventing it. And of course, none of the interesting higher-level properties, such as the four player paradox, or the role of bughouse in time, are almost certainly not planned in advance by the inventors of the variants they appear in; rather they appear as byproducts.

...

Proposals

7. Influential websites such as Chess.com might facilitate the development of new variants. Such variants as Omega Chess and Capablanca Chess are extensions of the game, but it may be that chess needs more than additional squares and pieces. But it is not possible to give innovation any particular formula. But there are nonetheless ways to facilitate innovation.
7.1. In order to put concrete flesh on abstract bones, one thing above all is necessary--money. A prize for the best variant idea may be the way to facilitate innovation. Research grants for creative players may also help to facilitate innovation.
...