Hi, thank you for taking the time to post this.
The decline message for https://variants.world/posts/1500 was not written under the assumption that the dead pieces were only used for aesthetics. We are well aware of your usage of the dead pieces (which is honestly quite creative, I have to admit) but the reason it was not mentioned in the decline message was because a) the variant had other immediate issues that needed to be addressed, and b) the feature was irrelevant to the issues and would work the same way with or without the issues.
Additionally, this dead piece feature, while being a very unique idea, will not always work as intended because the visual dead piece icons currently do not function reliably/properly, particularly when multiple dead pieces are captured. (it really should work as intended, but the server has some bugs that need to be fixed)
Note: I was unable to find a thread from the CV directory that exactly corresponds with this sort of topic, so I'm posting here instead.
Hi everyone, I'm @QtSeSc (formerly @honeybeee91), the creator of the declined variant Trench Warfare (https://variants.world/posts/1500). I have a few comments regarding the decline of this variant: this thread serves as a response to the criticism I have received regarding the variant.
I have noticed that, both in the decline message and the comments, this variant has been described as one with "heavily limited board vision", one comment attributing it to the dead pieces. However, I did not include the dead pawns just for aesthetics- if I had put gray pawns, then the variant would have become a shuffling variant completely true to its criticism. The dead pawns are colored so that you can track your opponent's movements: when your opponent captures a piece, you can see it on their capture menu.
In this position, I was playing as Yellow. On the top left part of the screen is a berolina pawn, showing me that my opponent moved one of the 2nd-rank alfils to the right half of the board. That way, I intended for this dead-pawn mechanic to compensate for the board vision problem. Additionally, by tracking your opponent's captured pawns, you can tell if your opponent is defending, attacking, shuffling, or overextending their position so that you can play accordingly. For example, in the game www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/77212349, I could see that my opponent was shuffling, so I prepared an offensive with the alfil corresponding to my opponent's royal alfil's squares so that the alfil, with quintuple protection, could not be captured without loss of material when it entered my opponent's territory.
I do not recall seeing such a use of colored dead pieces in a FoW variant (but I could be wrong). If the use of the dead pawns is a novel concept, then I believe that the quick decline was due to the belief that the dead pawns were for aesthetics only, as there is no mention of the dead pawn mechanic in the decline comment. If this was the case, is there a possibility that this position can be re-reviewed, and if it was not, is there a way I could implement this mechanic without shuffling possibilities?
Another comment dismissed this variant as "always [being] a shuffling variant", "[n]o matter whether without the mechanic or with the mechanic". However, the royal alfils attack a different set of squares (one's royal alfil can not capture the other royal), so one could use one's alfil corresponding to the opponent's royal alfil to attack a shuffling opponent with relative safety, assuming sufficient preparation.
One more comment claimed this variant to be a shuffling variant when pieces are traded down. Even though this is frequently true when most of the pieces are traded, I believe that the relative unpredictability of Fog offsets this potential.
So, even though I am a new variant creator and have chosen riskily to attempt a FoW submission, I still believe that this variant has potential for implementation: there are many different aspects of this variant, like tracking the locations of your opponent's pieces, tracking which of your opponent's pieces you captured (so you would know which of your opponent's pieces can attack what squares), choosing which dead pawns to capture (so as to reveal your position as infrequent as possible), choosing which pieces to attack with and where to attack, choosing which pieces to trade, and employing the grasshoppers' horizontal movements. So if my assumption regarding the decline comment is true (if the decline comment was due to the disregarding of the dead pawn mechanic), I am wondering if the variant could be re-evaluated before a second verdict, if possible.
Edit: In the rare case that this variant be accepted after a potential re-review, I would like to state the use of this mechanic directly in the description to make it (somewhat) more beginner-friendly.