Free Choice Chess (referred to as FCC on this site) is a Chess variant allowing the players to control the types of pieces they have in their force, subject to constraints to ensure fairness.
When was FCC invented?
FCC was invented in the 1980s. It was introduced in an article submitted to a now-defunct publication, World Game Review, published by Michael Keller of Baltimore, by the host of this site, Bruce R. Gilson.
What are the rules of FCC?
More details are available elsewhere on this site, but basically it is played on a board divided into three areas, a deployment area for each player which is 3 rows deep and a central area in which most of the play takes place which is 10 rows deep, the whole board being 10 columns wide (so it is a total of 16 rows by 10 columns). The game takes place in two phases, a deployment phase in which players take turns adding their choice of pieces to the board in their respective deployment areas, and the main phase, which plays in most respects like standard Chess.
What is the purpose of this site?
Since WGR is no longer published, and the only descriptions of FCC are in some expensive and hard to find reference books, this site was established in January 2010 as a central site for all material related to FCC.
Are contributions (of ideas, not of money!) desired?
Very much. If you decide to play a game of FCC, I really want to read your experiences, and in fact, I anticipate that new pieces, as well as changes to the table of piece values, will be made only if people who play the game get back with suggestions. The basic rules are, I believe, stable, though a larger or smaller board may be decided upon.
Please e-mail your messages to me at this site.
Any more suggestions as to how people can help?
At this time, what I am mostly interested in is people trying out FCC, playing some games, and reporting their experience to me. If it turns out that a piece has been wrongly valued (that counting it at the value in the value table on this site gives it too much power or not enough), this really should be something determined by playing with it, because if it is weaker that it has been valued here, players using that piece who are supposedly equal in forces to their opponents will lose more often than they win, and the opposite will be true if it is stronger than it has been valued here.
Aside from the piece values already assigned, the most important thing you can do is to suggest new pieces and the approximate values they should be assigned. The only other change I anticipate, besides revising the values ion the table and adding new pieces to it, would be, perhaps, a change from the 16x10 board.
Will games be recorded on this site?
Only if the people who played them want it! Seriously, if you send me a game result, you may ask me to include it or not to. If you want it included, we can build up a portion of the site with game scores. It will be necessary, of course, to include rather more than what a normal Chess game score would show:
It should be noted that moves should be recorded using the notation used on this site for uniformity. While in most standard Chess notations, the piece moved as well as the square where it goes (possibly, depending on the type of notation, both the square it comes from and the square it goes to) are given, I would suggest that giving the square a piece comes from and the one it goes to, without the type of piece, should be sufficient. From the deployment part and all moves prior to a given one, it should be possible to determine what pieces are on any square of the board, so a notation such as "0508-0808" should be perfectly clear without marking it with a symbol for a piece such as "R0508-0808.")
What other interests of the site owner can I reach on the Internet?
The original homepage that was put up by the site owner was on the now-defunct Geocities site. The page was primarily political, expressing his opinions, and these have now been put in blog form at his "Opinions and More" blog. The only pages that have been kept in substantially the same form as they were in at the Geocities site are his language pages, but he has set up some other Web sites devoted to old telephone exchanges and electoral systems.
He has written some books on topics in which he is interested, and you can buy his books on the Fibonacci sequence, on measurement systems, and on musical scales online.
This site could not have been set up without the extremely valuable assistance of David J. Howe, who has provided everything from scanned book pages to publicity on his own Chess variants site. Though all of these pages are my own, they would probably not be on the World Wide Web without David Howe's contribution.
Last modified by Bruce R. Gilson, January 27, 2010.
