Category talk:Chess variants

message: Without directly getting involved in the above debate, I would like to add a secondary listing of chess variants, listed by the primary way(s) the game differs from standard Western chess -- not because that's the "right" way to categorize, but simply to assist in searching for particular games.
For instance, I want to find out more about a particular chess variant which has only one rule different: "Only 'empowered' pieces can be moved or captured. Definition of 'empowered': the king is empowered, and recursively, any piece in range of an empowered piece of the same color is empowered." I don't know what this variant is called. To see if there is a wikipedia article about it would require reading a bit of every single chess-variant article in the alphabetic listing.
Thus a secondary listing is in order, quite aside from the above debate. -- DougMerritt 71.131.101.244 16:48, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Oops, what I was suggesting is more or less already done over on chess variant page (I still don't see anything about the variant I'm looking for, but I guess it would be some form of relay/anti-relay chess variant). 71.131.101.244 21:19, 1 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  As far as I know such variant wasn't yet suggested by anybody else. The best place to publish new orignal variants and get feedback from others is here.Andreas Kaufmann 19:11, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Second-level categories 

message: As the guy who created the Chaturanga Game Family cat, I suppose this mess is partly my fault. The intent was to remove some unconscious Western bias from the categorization: Shogi, for example, is not a "variant of" Chess any more than German is a variant of English; they are related via a common ancestor. The problem of course is that there is no common term for this grouping, nor consensus on the identity of the ancestor. It turns out that naming it based on the traditional claim that Chaturanga was the common ancestor was a poor choice because that theory was more controversial than I thought.
As a possible compromise, how about simply renaming "Chaturanga game family" to "Chess game family" and keeping it as the highest grouping in the hierarchy, putting Chess, Shogi, Xiangqi, etc under it, and keeping "Chess variants" as a subcategory of "Chess" for heterodox varieties derived from FIDE chess. It's not ideal, but probably less controversial and more intuitive. — Gwalla | Talk 23:00, 5 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How about renaming "Chaturanga game family" to "Chess-like games"? Andreas Kaufmann 21:19, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: That may be the most neutral we can be while still being useful. — Gwalla | Talk 06:56, 27 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Ok, I renamed "Chaturanga game family" category to "Chess-like games" category. Andreas Kaufmann 22:00, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  And that just got deleted for being redundant with :Category:Abstract strategy games. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. — Gwalla | Talk 05:02, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Variants vs. relatives 

message: Perhaps the Wikipedia article on Laser Chess should be attached to this listing? SpellSword (talk) 16:09, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Add Laser Chess?