How to make new variants accepted

Despite the attractive topic name made to draw your attention and bring you here, this post is made for future referencing from submission responses, intended to explain a quite common issue the CGA Team is currently facing within custom variant submissions.

TL;DR

• New Custom Variants are meant to bring new innovative ideas and mechanics of the chess game, not just a custom board with custom rules. The only exception for that is NCV targeting to be an improved version of a specific existing variant(s) or its concept.
• When submitting, making it clear in the description what innovative ideas the variant brings, or which existing variants it's targeting to replace or be a successor of (and if so, why exactly it is better than the original) will significantly increase the chances of your variants to be accepted.

First, I want to make it clear that we have a big number of variants on the official list, and that number is about to be cut 30%-50% one day again, due to low popularity of some variants.

As CGA Team, we are looking for interesting and unique variants.

A pitfall is that Variants has grown to a point where it got so many rules and features that the majority of variants can be interesting by themselves, by containing features and rules that are new or unique to regular chess. However, they are not new and neither unique for the chess variants history we have. Thus, when deciding whether to put a new variant submitted to the list or not, we can no longer solely rely on the fact that the variant has interesting rules which makes it interesting to play; instead, we now look at how well you implement different rules, mechanics of the game and create new combinations and types of games we have not yet seen, tested, and played.

Therefore, we are not looking for similar, one-type variants.

Please see the real image below, these all are submissions made by the same author.

This case was taken as a good example, and is not meant to be related to the particular author of these submissions. Please notice how different the last 4 positions are from the rest, being all under review at the same time.

There are 3 variants that we accepted after many revisions and many hours/days of thorough testing and debates, and now we don't look for any other similar variants to cover the same concept or share the same ideas, unless they are meant to be a better replacement of the existing variants or bring innovative ideas that make it worth keeping both versions on the list.

We will no longer consider submissions for review of variants that are too blatantly similar to or share the same concept of previously declined or accepted variants, unless a fair justification to do so is included in the description of your submission. If you are making one, please also mention what existing variant (or its concept) your variant strives to improve, providing all the points how and why it is better than the original, etc. Obviously, "rook is now closer to a king" is not a point by any means, unless there is a continuation with further explanation of why it matters.

That said, it's important to keep making custom variants based on existing concepts, improving the existing variants or making its successors, bringing more balance, gameplay variety, or fun elements to the games. We wouldn't have so many great, fun and popular variants without your input!

We are still looking for your submissions; we are only raising the quality requirements a little bit for the one-type variants.

Are you allowed to expand a current variant (Like making a VC3, or making a Forest, which is a bigger mini forest)

Quote from the post: "That said, it's important to keep making custom variants based on existing concepts, improving the existing variants or making its successors, bringing more balance, gameplay variety, or fun elements to the games. We wouldn't have so many great, fun and popular variants without your input!"

This post isn't about outright banning "sequel variants", but is more of a reminder that recycling the same concept over and over again without bringing anything new to the table (e.g., we declined a "Villagers Chess 3" submission a few months back, not because it was bad, but because it didn't incorporate anything exciting or innovative that VC1 and 2 didn't have and was mostly just a board expansion). Like the post also says, adding a justification in the description of the variant of what is new is encouraged.

TL;DR: Yes, but you need to add unique elements instead of just expanding the board by a few squares and you need to explain those changes.

@ChessMasterGS

Thank you, also how do you link games if you want to make a variant?

his 19th submission peaked my interest, the setup is like makruk but has different rules and pieces and the 18th submission is the closest you can possibly recreate makruk on chess.com because we dont have a silver general piece so they gotta be kings, and his 6th submission looks like a very interesting variant with those new guard pieces