On May 17, 5:02 pm, Rich Hutnik wrote:

On the chess front, a simplified chess game would help out some, count
it either Near or Simplified Chess. Even go with Simpleton's Chess.
Consider teaching people something that is easy for them to get into
as a starting point.

As it happens, during my web researches on Chivalry and associated
games, I found, to my surprise, that - not counting All the King's Men/
Smess - Parker Brothers actually once published a game, Citadel, that
could be considered to be a form of simplified Chess.

I describe it on my web page at

http://www.quadibloc.com/other/bo0104.htm

at the bottom (the web page is about Chivalry and Camelot, but also
includes diagrams of the boards for Chinese Checkers and Halma).

The main point of my post was to express a conclusion I'd reached from
considering the various things done with Checkers - including the
eleven-man ballot - that by looking at the _nature_ of the things done
to resolve the (inescapable!) problems with Checkers, we can see why
changes to Chess are resisted, and why a change to a different game,
by means of a Chess variant, is the most difficult of changes to get
accepted.

If Chess can be revitalized _without_ invalidating what the experts in
Chess have already learned, because the change is a very slight one,
that would be a direction more likely to be accepted.

John Savard