Vote for February's Golden Variants (2025)! - Chess Forums

Jan 22, 2025

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#1

Post from the vote in December:

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/vote-for-decembers-golden-variants

Not sure on what some of the terms in this post mean? Have any other questions? See any typos? Feel free to ask and comment below!

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

(Yes I am using 😀 instead of now lol)

Hello Custom Variants Community!

Getting this post out a bit later in the month than I expected, but I looked through the form responses again and was thinking of some things that could be done differently this year, so definitely expect some experimenting coming in maybe 1-2 months! Rest assured, these will (hopefully!) be good changes since there have been minor complaints that voting has gotten more boring...

Something that is definitely set in stone luckily is that the Platinum Variant Q1 (Quarter 1) will be selected next month, with the top 5 performing variants (based on arena activity) from the first 12 weeks advancing to the vote. This time around we have a lot of variants from both the newly added and the older variety, so it'll be interesting to see.

To address some concerns about the variant review process, give some updates, and to feature monthly stats, here are some bullet points that you can enjoy...

There are currently 32 variants that are Under Review (UR).
18 (56.25%) of those variants are NCVs, while 14 (43.75%) are WoFs.
The oldest post was made in November 7, 2024: https://variants.world/posts/805
Only 4 posts are over a month old, and 14 posts were made in the last week.
8 variants finished review by CGAs and had a verdict submitted after the last weekend testing session.
No variants are currently Pending Reply (PR).
Minihouse has been removed from the Extra section and moved to the Featured 2P section (this has been in effect for around a month now but consider this official confirmation)
@BN1208 now has his CGA badge and will be sent on WoF arena scheduling duty

Although there's a lot more variants that are Under Review currently, the CGAs and the NCV Testers will still be dedicated to actively reviewing all of your submissions! Special thanks to the creators of the Pocket Chess Challenge for reviving the WoF category after it was seemingly abandoned 😀

With that out of the way, let's get into this month's vote!

See the full 2025 schedule as it is updated here:

https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/2025-golden-variant-schedule

This month's format:

Four arenas, starting in February at 4 PM PST on Fridays (12 AM UTC on Saturdays)
"Regular" Golden Variant arenas will be 72 hours long
"All Week" Golden Variant arenas will be 168 hours (1 week) long

What you're voting for:

Week 1 (February 7) will be a Golden Variant arena of the winner of the Extra StrawPoll
Week 2 (February 14) will be a Golden Variant arena of the runner-up of the Extra StrawPoll
Week 3 (February 21) will be a Golden Variant arena of the winner of the Teams SP StrawPoll
Week 4 (February 28) has been predetermined and will be an All Week arena of Phantom Rooks (the most recently accepted NCV)

The voting process:

2 Golden Variant StrawPolls (1 for the Extra category, 1 for the Teams section)
5 variants for Teams vote, choices predetermined by the CGAs
10 variants for Extra vote, choices predetermined by the CGAs
Ranked-choice voting (as defined by StrawPoll)
Each StrawPoll will have 1 winner (calculated using StrawPoll's ranked-choice vote system), and will be selected and scheduled as described above
The polls will close on February 1 at 4 PM PST (February 2 at 12 AM UTC)

StrawPoll Links:

Teams Self-Partner: https://strawpoll.com/QrgewdNpRyp

Extra (2P): https://strawpoll.com/wAg3Q8eKdy8

Happy voting!