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⬅️ Previous capture (2024-08-18)
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written 2024-08-13
I love turn-based strategy games. I greatly enjoyed Go and Prismata for a long time. I've also had a couple Chess phases, but my current feelings on it are fairly negative.
The existence of stalemates is objectively bad design, because it encourages players who are hopelessly behind to play on instead of resigning, incase the opponent accidentally stalemates them. This leads to a lot of time spent playing with no chance of winning and the feeling that nothing you do matters.
One might argue that stalemates are only common enough to encourage this at noob level, but I disagree. I'm about a match for the level 4 bot on lichess.org and I still accidentally stalemate when I'm winning.
Stalemates also go against the intuitive logic that the reason you can't move your king into danger is because it would lose you the game, and if you can't make any moves because all your moves would make you lose, then you should lose.
Chess is one of the most blunder-prone strategy games. A blunder is an extremely and obviously bad move, like moving your queen into danger for no reason. People don't make blunders because they have a poor grasp of strategy, but because they didn't notice a line of attack. Many people find it unsatisfying for games to be decided by blunders, because there's no strategic lesson to learn from them. And at my level, almost every game is decided by blunders.
Part of the reason Chess is more blunder-prone than Go is that causation in Chess isn't well approximated by locality. You can't just look at the area around a move to see what it affects. You can guard a piece, make a seemingly unrelated move on the other side of the board, and then oops the piece is no longer guarded.
This isn't a big deal, but it's annoying because of how blatant it is. Most other strategy games that I've played (Go, Prismata) have some sort of compensation feature such as giving a few extra points to the person who moves second, but in Chess moving first is just blatantly better.
Chess has a lot of situations where I feel like I can't make any progress because every enemy piece is guarded, and it would take more turns for me to stack attackers than it would take for them to stack defenders. I'm sure my opponent feels the same way. I don't like this stagnation. In Go, on the other hand, even if you aren't sure what move is best, you can always find a move that accomplishes *something*, that moves the game forward.