I like the losing on points idea, can't stand when someone who is clearly losing plays out a game, I mean like I'm going to blunder my two rook and queen advantage in some epic sleepwalk. wtf, know when to quit. We have games together, without revealing to much YOU SCARE ME! You favor sharp open positions am I right? you don't have to answer.. see you on the black and white!
instead of a time limit, what about a move limit?
Another problem, the time limit was put in place because people took too long to move. Even with a move limit, you could wind up with a long game because people could spend too much time deciding what move to make.
I usually don't worry about people taking a long time to move. I'm more annoyed that most of my wins are because people just time out. I know that my idea changes the game a lot but that's part of the idea, to make me think and play in a different way, I wouldn't compare it to the standard chess we know any more than chess960.
And Sangwin, you understand perfectly!
No offence I think it would be a bad idea because you would end up with consecutive moves which would ruin a game
why are folks constantly trying to shorten games which at several days/move are never going to be quick.
if you want speed then play live chess
The purpose isn't just to shorten the games, but instead cause people to think in different terms. For example, in this case it's possible to have a game where only 10 moves are played by both sides, if neither side loses any pieces, it's a draw, if one side makes mistakes and is a bishop down or something, then the other side only has to maintain the advantage and doesn't even have to checkmate as long as they can survive without losing more pieces than they capture.
It leads to a defensive playing style that is different from the agressive checkmates which involve sacrificing pieces to set up a checkmate. They still could win by checkmate but only if they are fast enough to do it before the turns expire.
I sort of got this idea from playing battle for wesnoth. It has no time limits, but to win you sometimes have to just survive a number of turns but other times you have to defeat the enemy leaders before the turns are out.
Bad dea. In addition to what is mentiond above, there's an unfair win possibility. Let's say I'm black and down a rook. I take my opponent's queen with my queen, even though it is protected and doing so would allow mate f my opponent could make his/her move. I'll win in an unfair way. People can just take advantage of this too much. Even so, it is an interesting idea.
I had this really wacky idea. Suppose that it were possible to create games that didn't have any time limit, but instead had a limit to the number of moves both players could make. Then, if no one has checkmated, then whoever has fewer points worth of pieces loses. This would prevent extremely long games from being played out till the end when somebody is clearly winning.
Though I don't think this would make much sense in rated games since it does change the game a lot.