Variant Design Patterns

I've long noted that many concepts that are left, especially for Wheel of Fortunes which require a more sidelong observation than the conventional variants, usually attained by a sudden glint of a tedious precogitation, thus highly increasing the number of unsuccessful tries at making those concepts. The key to all of these implementation failures, in a grand majority of cases, lies within the miscomprehension of actual steps to fix an issue and not the caused symptoms — an example of this would be a creator trying to add complexity via improving opening variety, yet that disregards strategy variety and as such exacerbates the complexity issue instead of improving it.

Below you'll find a compilation of design patterns for variant creation that shall assist in fixing these subtle and elusive issues and not the semblance consequences of the issues themselves. It is just time to end this lingering preamble and go over the actual content provided below:

TIMER.

THE PROBLEM: You are actively trying to implement the forced transition between the game stages, i.e. the middlegame and the endgame, or to cut out a game stage that is hindering the gameplay (see Thermopylae, the endgame stage is largely cut out). Players however tend to find loopholes on how to force a particular stage, or try to keep more pieces to obtain a victory or attain secondary winning conditions, thus distracting you from the real concept you're trying to implement.

THE SOLUTION: Instead of having the players manage their countdowns, delegate it to the player with minimal possible responsibilities, usually a zombie. The side with minimal possible responsibilities will be forced to slowly initiate the countdown, and you can easily provide more complex scenarios than just being dependent on moves.

EXAMPLES:

Thermopylae; Spy Party; Death Race; Runway; Gridlock; The Treasure Map; Among Us; Feed the Dog; Mathletics Cup; DIY Maze; Permafrost; T; 

BIND.

THE PROBLEM: You have been attempting to focus the gameplay to revolve around a key strategic point the players are trying to take control of. As such, when one player's pieces are expulsed, it is expected they will, in most cases, lose the game. However you found a truly annoying issue: the players can just escape from the strategic point and control the point from afar, thus making the gameplay much staler.

THE SOLUTION: Force the pieces to revolve around the strategic point, be it via immediate loss if a piece leaves, totally being unable to move or escape or just not having a legal move with the piece. Thus, if we remove all other pieces, the position takes the form of a trebuchet: a mutual zugzwang position, and as such compensates for the complexity, variety and strategy variety and balance as well. The player must break the bind in their favour, as such there is a choice of allowing the opponent to win (zugzwang), or winning yourself.

EXAMPLES: 

Chamber of Executioners; Solar Eclipse; Zombie Protection (a very advanced form implemented based on move orders); Rush of Rooks; 

CHAIN OF MOVES.

THE PROBLEM: You're trying to give a certain player an inherent advantage, for example, double moves or extra piece strength. However, by doing that you also gave strength to their opponents, as too much material means it is easier to lose it, while variant rules affect all players if their effect is long-term, or what you try to do is just impossible to do with the existing variant rules.

THE SOLUTION: Break down the legal move chain to a player with minimal responsibilities, usually a zombie, that shall manage how exactly moves are made. For example: move one piece to stop a teammate from being mated, move any piece, then move a pawn to avoid yourself getting mated, end of the move chain. Here's an example:  https://www.chess.com/variants/custom/game/26539291/0/3.

EXAMPLES:

2 players, 5 squares (advanced form based on move orders); Escape of Wazirs (advanced version based on move orders);

CONCAVE ARBORESCENCE:

THE PROBLEM: You're trying to improve the variant complexity via variety, however, you've noticed that the more move variety you add, the less complexity there is, and as such attacks are almost fully nullified. As such, you're never able to achieve the desired level of complexity in your variant, moreover, you were unable to implement the desired ideas due to them failing via interferences or just direct refutations.

THE SOLUTION: In order to implement contrived ideas that are impossible without sufficient complexity, the pattern suggests you stop focusing on the complexity and instead focus on how sharp the openings are. The pattern suggests you focus only on the following aspects:
1. Sharpness of the openings should be very high: however the disadvantage should only appear during the middlegame.
2. Variety of the openings should be very high: however the variety should only start becoming distinct during the middlegame.
3. Attacks in the openings should be minimal: however blunders in the openings should become possible to exploit only in middlegames.
Effectively, the pattern suggests you stop forcing the lines during the opening, and instead maximally restrict the attacking potential. Thus, the openings will only focus on giving you attacking potential but not the attacks themselves: this pattern effectively nullifies pre-middlegame attacks as a whole and suggests you replace attacks with attacking potential.

EXAMPLES:

Unison; Phalanx; Storming the Castle; Red Light;

PROXY.

THE PROBLEM: For quite some time, you've been playing around with a 4P FFA Atomic variant: the gameplay turned out very deep, however, you soon stumbled on an issue: the players in openings are way too commonly missing quick mates, and as such the mating players immediately obtain +20 for mate. That said, as soon as the checkmate occurs, there is nothing one can do to interfere, and the balance is absent: you're unable to achieve multi-stage attacks or to slow them down and as such, all the game is focused around these central pieces.

THE SOLUTION: This pattern suggests that you split up the responsibilities: the royal is trapped and confined in an alcove, with the only key piece guarding all entrances to it being the presumable royal piece that was the royal before introducing the pattern. As such, you must first capture the proxy royal piece to be able to get to the real royal piece. 

EXAMPLES:

Counterturn; Checkers 2.0; 

PIECE FACTORY.

THE PROBLEM: You've been long attempting to make a support for setting up the armies during the game, but things like Setup Chess or immediate promotion result in the promotion occurring too quickly and setups being highly limited, as there's no variety of setups, the gameplay revolves too quickly and players are unable to construct a plan.

THE SOLUTION: Instead of trying to delegate piece creation to zombies, not busy teammates or variant rules, implement it directly via an isolated, hard-to-access echelon of pawns that need to be pushed before the promotion is available: this will both increase the number of plausible setups and delay the setup stage until the middlegame.

EXAMPLES:

Thermopylae; Warp Speed; Sergeants Laboratory; War for Throne; The Racing Grace; Unique; 

LOCK.

THE PROBLEM: You wanted to introduce pieces after certain gameplay stages pass by, to augment the gameplay with new innovative ideas and introduce numerous imbalances. However, when attempting to implement that via variant rules like Seirawan Setup you noticed that players may just sacrifice one of their pieces in order to stop you from achieving that and that there is a rush to quickly free those pieces and pile up even ignoring the bad position, just to preclude any attack on the royals.

THE SOLUTION: Delegate the new piece introduction when a player (or a zombie) is eliminated, or the players take a special dedication to free the pieces from the zombie's hold, but not the player's hold. This is a much more secure way to mark a very important transition when players are ready to pass into a different game stage and greatly improves many position aspects.

EXAMPLES:

Chase the Royal; 100000; Inside the Horror Night; The Western War; Evacuation; The Treasure Map; Excalibur; 

INITIATIVE INTERFERENCE.

THE PROBLEM: You've been designing a variant centred around a piece imbalance: the royals are offset from each other and whoever takes the initiative first can attack the royal endlessly, thus making it the battle for the initiative. However, a slightly more deep opening analysis revealed that the first side to move obtains the initiative via an unexpected line, thus forcing one side to always defend and the other one to always attack.

THE SOLUTION: The pattern suggests you split up the pieces into pieces which are purely offensive or purely defensive. Then, introduce a rather quick but not easy promotion that is only achievable via trading pieces, thus forcing the defensive player to push the pawns. After pawns move, that player shall promote them and launch their attack, thus forcing the player to defend until another pawn goes for promotion and so on: the initiatives will always swap and interfere with each other.

EXAMPLES:

Inferno; The X of Tricks; Metro; 

LINE ITERATION.

THE PROBLEM: After playing around with a sharp giveaway variant with its main idea being forced lines going more than 15 moves deep, you've found that players can interfere too much and the first side to move is always at an advantage: no matter what piece arrangements you try, there are always some forced lines. When you do find a fix for them, you notice that the variety has just diminished.

THE SOLUTION: This pattern suggests you maximally restrict the legal moves first so that instead of 20 logical moves players get around 6 logical moves at max. Secondly, this pattern suggests you violate one of the accepting requirements and make the variant ultra-sharp in the middlegame but not the opening. Thus, the first moves players make settle the general ideas, and it is much less hard to screw up during the opening, this adds a lot of beginner-friendliness to compensate for the sharpness. Then the pattern suggests you make the lines so deep that up to the point of endgame players are forced to play along their logical plans, and the pattern suggests you fully isolate these unique lines. While this may seem counter-intuitive, this greatly improves all the position aspects if your variant centres around limited deep lines.

EXAMPLES:

Underground War; Giveaway UW; Castle on a Hill; Dead Man's Chest; Soldiers' Avenue; T;

I hope you find this post insightful for creating these particularly complex variant concepts.

Are you going to pin this?

Would it truly be too burdensome for you to drop your grandiloquent and, at times, esoteric parlance for diction that is imperceptibly less pompous and perspicuously more digestible?

Thank you for all you do bsrti.

Thank you for your positive feedback — I've immediately discerned the accuracy of your usage of the prepositions: the first for preposition points at my diction, and the second for preposition is synonymous to "because", which effectively means you're implying that if I drop my grandiloquent and ornate parlance it shall become more ambiguous.

I'm admiring your parlance and phrasal verbs awareness, for you easily recalled that phrasal verb "drop for" doesn't exist and purposefully didn't use "drop in favour of".

This is very instructive, but some of the links were broken to account closures and cannot be accessed by us anymore (like “Inside the Horror Knight”, an example of the LOCK idea). I suggest we put pictures of each position here, rather than link threads.

Also, I wonder if we should stick this thread to the front page.