playBunny: Ahhh, I see it now. I used to play in an online chess league and the organizers knew there was cheating going on. So one fellow developed a piece of software that could detect the cheating by running the suspected games through the program. In every case the offender denied the charges. But when pressed on and on, they confessed. I was surprised as to how accurate this little program was in finding the cheats.
When I suspected cheating, I'd try to engage them in a bit of theory and see how well they could hold up to that. When they couldn't explain their ideas, I knew something was not right.
grenv: That's true. Once I swore my opponent was getting more doubles than I (in a multi game match) and when I checked, it was two more double rolls in my favor! lol
rod03801: i've never played anti so I'm a bit new at it all. I'm not one that likes variants much. Loop chess is fun but that's about it for chess. I like backgammon race and hyper but beyond that, I'm not much on the other games. ;)
rod03801: OK. I think I understand your question. I think it's a disadvantage to clone. That's the beauty of the game. You can leave a piece exposed where normally you wouldn't.
OTOH, if you have most of your home base covered, and you can put your opponent on the bar, he/she can't get that piece out becasue there will be no slots to land on (of few choices). And your cloned piece can get out (assuming opponents home base has openings) and so the cloned piece is not a disadvantage to you.
Another advantage to cloning might be to build up a wall in your opponents home base thereby keeping him from getting all his pieces home. But the downside of that seems to be that you still have a gauntlet of your own to navigate and every time you land on an opponents piece, you add another one of yours to the bar. ;)
So the biggest advantage I can see is only really available if you have your homebase covered so that an opponents piece on the bar has no place to go :)
does that make sense? I should probably learn the exact terms of the board and pieces! lol
alanback: I agree and I think the doubles remove from the game well-played strategies. What has been the response to eliminating doubles in race games?
Has the idea of eliminating the rolling of doubles in hyper ever been discussed? I'm just wondering what others think of the idea at the moment. It seems that by removing doubles, it would add more to the elements of strategy and tactics in the game while eliminating the "stealinng" of a well played game buy the lucky double sixes!!! I've been robbed too many times! ;) OTOH, I've done a bit of robbing myself but with the doubling cube the stakes are higher. What do others think of eliminating (or adding as an option) the removal of doubles in hyper?