Mandatory Participation Chess

Revision as of 18:54, 16 September 2023

What is this?

The key idea here is "if a piece is inactive for too long, it's removed from the game".

Equipment

A normal chess board and pieces to play on, and some method to count turns-of-inactivity per piece. A computerised version of this would have that built-in, but a physical game may handle it by having a set of buckets (conceptual buckets. In practice cups?) within which a second of each piece resides. Alongside the cups is a counter, thereby allowing all pieces to have their count changed reasonably quickly

Gameplay

Every piece has a counter of how many turns since it was last moved. If it passes the threshold of inactivity, it is removed from the game.

The game has not been playtested, so the main open question is: what should the threshold be? Some options are:

• Some offset to the original count of players pieces (ie, 16±x)** eg, if threshold is exactly 16 (offset=0), then once every piece is played once with no repetition, the player is locked into playing those pieces in that order forevermore, or losing additional pieces. A positive offset allows for flexibility, a negative offset means some pieces will NEVER get to play, and tactics will be to decide which
• Some offset to the count of player pieces remaining (ie, n±x)* some ratio to the count of pieces (basically a dynamic offset rather than a static one)

Additional rule ideas* the king is excempt from threshold and may remain motionless forever (I'm not a fan of this idea)

• the kings movements excempt other pieces from having their idle count increment. (I think this is appropriate)

Origin

This game came about from this discussion thread on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greg.tannahill.3/posts/pfbid02qoVResFCX3bLNu1o52794rPHqBV2hdTwSySwkH3dMu9AradFZkSMAV8QBVD4H2SZl?comment_id=309729224797213