drummyfish wrote: Thu Jul 09, 2026 12:18 pm
Opening theory is annoying and I think the prevailing opinion even among pros is that it sucks and has to be eliminated, which is why variants like chess960 (aka Fischer random aka "freestyle chess") and chess324 exist. I've only been playing 960 for many months now and my impression is that it's gaining more popularity overall, which is good.
That's something I appreciate about the non-chess board games I listed in the OP; there is some memorization that can be done in regards to tactics but getting a few moves into the game will almost certainly bring you to a novel state where memorization of openings will no longer be relevant.
That's also something I quite enjoy about card games: there's always a random element but the contents of peoples' hands can be inferred (especially in dominos -- only 28 tiles to keep track of!) and also bluffed to a degree.
Had a great night of bridge and mahjong at my local board game club last night. The bridge games we played before mahjong started were incredibly intellectually stimulating. The mahjong games were good fun still, the players at my table were all strong players so we could have some good bluffs going on.
The mahjong variant we play is Zung Jung. Everyone at my wife's table were going for high-point hands EXCEPT one girl who is a little slow would pung and chow like crazy and ended every hand of the night in a "chicken hand". So that girl was the big winner of her table with ... 15 points... while the guy who won my table had like 300 points. I managed to break even and score a satisfying second place.
RE: Chess :
I lived with a chess grandmaster for a while and he spent almost every waking moment either watching live top-tier chess or reading PLN logs of old games. When his friends would visit they would spend most of their time going over specific positions for 30 minutes or more at a time, for hours at a time. Really cool to watch. It amazed me how well they could memorize specific board states and also patterns of moves. He said that he liked the idea of randomized chess but when he was actually playing it was almost exclusively bullet chess. Every now and then he would visit local chess tournaments and game the ranking system to get spending money without affecting his rank too much, but outside of that, if he wasn't reviewing specific games/board states, or playing bullet chess, he would easily dominate the officially listed best players in my state.
Chess is a cool world. But short of going to prison I don't see it becoming my "home world" so to speak ....
