Creating the Variant

Making good variants requires a lot of revising, thinking and analysis.

In this forum i want to show you a way how to identify issues and revise your variants correctly based on the issues. I will take as an example my submission Stone Lock. I am not saying it is good, but it is certainly not terrible - the main goal here is to show a way how to keep making your variants better.

Stage 1 - Idea and Concept

Unfortunately, i see a lot of people fail on the the very first stage. It is much easier to fit an idea into a chessboard rather than fitting a chessboard into an idea. That's why you should have a brief idea of what unique your variant will introduce - otherwise, the whole concept is useless.

Your idea might shift later in the future, but it is important to have it in the beginning. My first on the Stone Lock was making an NCV version of Obsidian Pinnacle with fatal gamerule - quite different from my result!

I went into the board editor, and spent a good 10 minutes of my time making the initial position. After choosing the piece palette (deciding which pieces i would use)m placing them on the board was easy. I spent a good 10 minutes of my time after that removing all first move threats and overpowered strategies. And that's my concept! I just turned my concept into a basic visualization of my idea.

Stage 2 - Experimentation

My variant had a few issues:

• It is really hard to get to the hill
• The promotion is really hard
• You usually have to sacrifice a piece for a pawn
• The gameplay is not enjoyable

I only could fix this issues by changing the position drastically. This is where the second part comes in - changing gamerules, pieces, board according to the issues until all or most of them are gone. Here are some solutions i found to my issues:

• It is really hard to get to the hill - Put the king closer to the hill by removing two ranks
• The promotion is really hard - Remove two ranks in order to make it take less moves to promote.
• You usually have to sacrifice a piece for a pawn - Added more defensive pieces
• The gameplay is not enjoyable - Hm how do i fix that one

With all these factors taken into considerations, i remade the position:

While my try fixed the pawn promoting and impossible to get to the hill issue, it introduced some new ones:

• Some pieces were useless and not getting used
• The game became pretty cramped

So, what do you? You try again.

• Pawn are again really hard to promote
• Most pieces are only getting used to stop pawns

And again!

In the process of revising i had to abandon the idea of making a bigger Obsidian Pinnacle, so I decided to lock the royal completely and make so that you have to promote the pawn to checkmate. Reshaping my idea a little bit made this a lot better! There were still some problems:

• The game was a tradefest
• Because of crazyhouse, i could put my pawns anywhere
• Blue had a big tempo advantage

I was gonna make a YouTube tutorial on this lol

Finish when?

today

boo

This is way different that my approach on creating variants, and I think some aspects of this guide are wrong (or at least redundant/tedious)

Can you list some examples for improving?

I am planning to make my own guide, but the big issues, at least for Choco’s guide here, are the experimenting and testing stage (not shown here)

For the experimenting stage after the initial draft, it is best to create 3-5 variations of the variant after finding issues, with some minor changes and others with drastic changes. Why? This helps create a diversity of applicable ideas in each version and the version that is best can have the best ideas from the other variations.

Testing during the 3-5 variations should also decide on whether the concept itself is good enough. If there are too many problems and the gameplay doesn’t feel fun & diverse enough (problem in the variant shown in the guide itself), it is better to cancel the variant rather than waste time on working on it when you can use the time to create better variants or revisions.

I like it.

bumpppppp

142857 (Mathe-Song) - YouTube

the song is peak but what does it have to do with the forum which is kinda dead

Idk, what this has to do with the forum either, soo ...

lol