On Mar 31, 10:16 am, Offramp wrote:

As someone said at the time, most players would rather have larger
brains than larger boards.

The trouble is, of course, that a larger brain isn't something that's
easy to obtain. There are no Brain-Gro pills at your local pharmacy.

It's easy enough to make a larger chessboard.

But what's the point?

The obvious result is that a larger board with more pieces would make
Chess more complicated, and so a larger brain would be needed to play
it well. Doesn't this make it a step in the wrong direction, then, and
perhaps what we need is Chess on a smaller board, more to a human
scale?

But a larger board has other results, only slightly less obvious.
Dumping opening theory overboard helps relieve our small brains of a
pile of memorization. Applying general positional principles of
strategy, and carrying out the tactics of piece encounters, shouldn't
get all that much more complicated on a slightly larger board, and
we'll be playing against other humans anyways.

John Savard