Vote for April's Golden Variants

Scroll down to the bold text if you want to know how to vote without reading my entire message 🙂

Hello Custom Variants community,

On February 24 of this year, we started making Golden Variants arenas every week. Much to my initial surprise, they've been some of the most active arenas on the entire server by far!

When we started making them more often in 2022, Golden Variants arenas were made for the purpose of trying to popularize interesting variants that don't have a lot of players, in addition to introducing NCVs that had just been released. Following the merge of 4 Player Chess and Variants, the CGA team had to remove almost 50% of all NCVs due to pre-existing balancing issues with old variants that didn't meet the requirements anymore and lack of popularity for a lot of them. Golden Variants arenas aim to make sure such a future "purge" like this doesn't have to be so drastic.

We've seen this work already: on Week 4, Villagers Chess was the Golden Variant and now it has an active leaderboard of over 50 players (which is pretty healthy for a start), and a club for it run by a community member is getting more popular.

The last Golden Variant (Week 6, if you're keeping track), will be Mini Forest, and this time I want your input on what the next 4 selections should be!

To vote, go to https://strawpoll.com/NMnQ50PzYn6 and enter up to 4 selections.

The guidelines are as follows:

1. The variants cannot be in the Most Popular or Common section, but may come from the Featured or Extra section (exceptions: Checky Spell Chess and Racing Kings also cannot be chosen).
2. The variants must be 2 Player NCVs or 2 Player Historical Variants. This may change in the future.
3. The variant cannot be one of the previous 6 Golden Variants from 2024. (Cross Derby, Rookmate, Behind the Mirror, Villagers Chess, Blackletter Chess, Mini Forest)

Whichever 4 get the most votes will be the selections!

The variants must be 2 Player NCVs or 2 Player Historical Variants.

Current Standings:

1. Ashtandrez 7 
2. XXL Chess 4 
3. Amazon Jungle 4
4. Caught in a Snag 3 
5. Minihouse 3 
6. Chaturanga 3
7. The X of Tricks 2 
8. Infiltration Danger 2 
9. Rubicon 2 
10. Crazy Cavalry 
11. Gothic Chess 
12. Rubicon 
13. Thermoplyae

Voting ends in 4 days and 4 hours

lol, notice how if you the site to vote it says

"For example: Ashtandrez, Chaturanga, Rubicon, Caught in a Snag"

and all those variants have at least 2 votes.

- people are voting based on the example when they don't know what to vote for.

Well, Rubicon has barely any votes, so at least popular opinion shows that most people at least like Ashtandrez… can’t say it’s not suspicious, but it’s likely just a coincidence

To whoever submitted this, your vote isn't gonna come out in one piece

P.S., I finished proofreading the current votes. I thought I made the guidelines pretty clear but almost half the votes had a 4 Player variant or some other error. I've also edited the examples so that they are nonsense in the current context so that people can (likely) vote more unbiased.

Maybe what we really learned from this is that people can't spell Thermopylae

Final Results:

1. Ashtandrez 9 
2. Amazon Jungle 9
3. Caught in a Snag 7 
4. Minihouse 7 
5. Thermopylae 6 
6. Chaturanga 5 
7. Rubicon 5 
8. XXL Chess 5 
9. The X of Tricks 2 
10. Infiltration Danger 2 
11. Gothic Chess 2 
12. Crazy Cavalry  
13. Seirawan Chess 

amazon jungle!!!!!!!!!!!

Arenas for April have been scheduled; with the exceptions of Minihouse being 3|2 and Amazon Jungle being 1|2, the other two are both 5|2 as usual.

The next vote for May will happen in around 3-4 weeks, I'll observe how this cycle plays out and whether or not anything needs to be changed for the next one.

Ashtandrez's Golden Variant feature has been moved forward 24 hours so as to not coincide with @martinaxo's own arena for his "Variants Games" tournament.