Chess: An interesting concept ruined by too many design flaws

Found this review of Chess on another website.  It's pretty spot-on!  Here's a short excerpt:

During a game of Chess, players alternate making moves and capturing pieces while they extend their influence over the map. The rules are pretty straightforward and mostly involve moving your Pawns either one or two squares. Pawns capture diagonally, which makes sense because medieval footmen swung their swords at angles, to either side of their shields. There are many nice touches like that in the rules, which help to bring out the theme of running an army in the middle ages. When all the players have moved their Pawns as far as they can go, the game bogs down a bit and becomes less interesting. The addition of another layer of strategy could have helped at this point. For example, little wooden cubes are conspicuously absent in this game. Why didn't the designer use little cubes to represent food, cloth, wood, stone, or something like that?

One aspect of the rules that almost saves the game of Chess is the diplomacy system. As the game unfolds, players are allowed to talk to each other and give their assessments of the game, their opinion of various positions on the map, their speculations on winning possibilities, and any other information they feel is relevant at the moment. This diplomacy feature is highly innovative and turns an otherwise dry experience into a game that almost works. See the gameplay section below for further thoughts on diplomacy.

One last rule that I didn't particularly like was the one that lets your King and Castle change position during the game. I suppose this was meant to simulate preparations for a medieval seige, but it's a hard rule to remember. And if the King is better off in the corner of the map, why not start him off there? In fact, why not let players choose the starting position of their pieces? Even the old game of Risk follows this common practice. This is yet another of the many eccentricities of Chess that seem at odds with common principles of good game design. 

There are three ways to win in Chess: checkmate, victory points, and resignation. Checkmate is pretty straightforward so won't go into it here. If there is no checkmate, then the winner is the player who has the most points at the end of the game. A Pawn is worth one point, a Knight is worth three, etc. This system works pretty well, though it could have been improved by placement of a victory point track running around the board. Why the designer neglected to add this obvious feature is a bit of a mystery. As it is, you have to keep track of your points, which gets annoying and tedious. Resignation of your opponent is the most common way of winning. This usually happens during the diplomacy phase of the game, which involves discussion with your opponent about how he or she is doing. 

Is this written for kids,  or by one ?

Amusing!

It's written from the perspective of someone who has played many board games but never really played chess.  What kind of game requires the players to keep score in their heads?  It does seem pretty weird when you think about it.

Written by someone who never really played chess?  Isn't that like reviewing a movie you never really watched?  (Certainly reads like it).

Lots of flaws to point out, but ok, we'll start with what you bring up.

The game wasn't "designed" with points.  The relative values are a rough guide for new players, are not part of the rules at all, and are never added up to determine a winner.

Also the game wasn't designed to simulate anything.  The rules exist (and have survived) only because they produce a game rich in strategy and tactics.

Also chess is older then the middle ages.

Chess is perfectly fine as it is.  If you want Fischer Random that's an option too.  There is a certain mathematical and geometric beauty to chess that opens the door to technique and relies on utilizing the pieces' mechanics and exploiting advantages. 

One could argue that chess could be improved, but this article is... well, a joke.

You might say that this thesis is a good concept, but ruined by too many design flaws...

I got more curious about this post, so went to the link provided by Tiltowait.

Reading the complete "review" made it all clear. An amusing article written by someone who clearly understands chess very well indeed.

Funny, and this thread emphasises the humour bypass of a lot of chess.com'ers.

@Scottrf lol. I know. how could you not get that this was a joke?

My favorite

This thread will quickly expose who is and who isn't good at the internet.

...and I put my hand up as not getting the joke at first. In my defence however, I only had read the excerpt provided by the OP, not the full article.

It actually might be interesting to design a variant of chess, where the players are allowed to arrange their pieces in any position on the 4 ranks of the board on their side, without being able to see how the opponent is arranging theirs. Then, once the game begins, the positions of all the pieces are revealed, and from that starting position the players proceed to play a regular chess game.

I think that game is called Stratego.

http://www.raindropchess.com/

Well... that's similar, but not exactly what I was talking about. Although I wouldn't be surprised if that already existed as well.

The problem with yours is there would be standard setups decided upon and nobody would vary.

You mean that eventually people would figure out what the most effective setups are, like how opening lines are created in regular chess? Yes, I guess that would happen, but I don't think it would be just one setup that is clearly the best, so there would still be some element of guessing.