...especially when you've got a creative block and you start searching for chess variants. Over the last one/two months I've been doing a fair bit of research (of course, I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of chess variants), culminating in the purchase of 'The Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants' by D.B. Pritchard.

Over the last two weeks, though, I've been intrigued mainly by a series of articles by Ralph Betza (entitled Ideal and Practical Values) and by a couple of variants based on astronomy (namely, Mercurial, Ganymede, Io and Europan Chess) and a variant created by Edgar Rice Burroughs (sp?) called Jetan. That, of course, is something that piqued my interest in creating variants for races I'd created for S:NE settings, or maybe even S:AE or earlier races...

(sorry, random musings of a creatively blocked, sleep-deprived and recovering-from-cold mind)