AbigailII: In general, I've encountered the opposite. I often play late in the evenings and often find myself quitting to go to bed as my European (or Australian, or Japanese, or whatever... why're you limiting it to just US vs. EU?) opponent is just starting his/her move day.

The current state of Fischer Random Chess has one very quirky "feature" to it.
When someone puts out an invitation, he or she can see the board position after it is submitted. Anyone who sees the invitation (be it a public invitation, a tournament game (this matters less), or a personal invitation) can also see it.

This allows the inviter to only set up games that he or she likes, as well as allowing those choosing from the "Waiting games" list to choose the same.

Can the 1st and 8th rows be listed as ?'s, and have the board position randomized on acceptance, rather than during creation?

Czuch Czuckers: Or even a filter! Wouldn't that be great?

pgt:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/yeuk
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ogrism
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/qiviut

Are you saying that because certain words aren't in your vocabulary or known to you, then they're not allowable? This is the whole point of using dictionaries as a reference for allowable words. Is Random House not a good enough source?

The OSD changes every year, so it's quite possible that those 3 words were recent additions. I don't have one on hand, so I can't verify that, however.

KotDB: Absolutely. You're proposing changing the scoring rules. Why wouldn't that be relevant?

KotDB: You left out one very important part of the AGA rules: scoring is by area (as in Chinese scoring), not territory (as in Japanese scoring)

MTC: No, that is the incorrect impression. When both players pass, they are signalling that they are done placing stones. Any stones that are not "alive" (take a good read on http://senseis.xmp.net for what it takes to be alive) should be marked as dead, and then the score should be tallied.

pauloaguia: Because
A) He shouldn't have to
B) It reduces his score, which is not something that he wants to do. In this particular case, if he captured the 4 dead stones at J8, G10, F10, & A12 and faith passed on all 4 turns, then he would actually lose.

I have often thought about what's *really* wrong with sorting by "Time left" and possible remedies to fix the issue. I think the main problem people have with "slow players" is not that they play slow, but more that games with long time limits have to wait most of that limit to bubble up the list of games to be played.

For example, say I have 5 games, with time limits of 1 day (game A), 3 days (game B), 5 days (game C), 7 days (game D), and 30 days (game E). And now, for the sake of the discussion, let's say that I play all games that have <3 days left to play on them (They're very mind-intensive games and I can only play once per day!). We will also assume that my opponents are *very* fast and move within an hour of me playing.
Day Games Played Time remaining
---------------------------------
1 A 1, 2, 4, 6, 29
2 A, B 1, 3, 3, 5, 28
3 A 1, 2, 2, 4, 27
4 A, B, C 1, 3, 5, 3, 26
5 A 1, 2, 4, 2, 25
6 A, B, D 1, 3, 3, 7, 24
7 A 1, 2, 2, 6, 23
8 A, B, C 1, 3, 5, 5, 22
9 A 1, 2, 4, 4, 21
10 A, B 1, 3, 3, 3, 20
11 A 1, 2, 2, 2, 19
12 A, B, C, D 1, 3, 5, 7, 18

etc,
I think most people can follow this. From my point of view, I'm keeping all of my games up-to-date and playing, on average, 1.92 moves per day. Out of 5 games, that's not horrible, I guess. Now, increase the number of A games to 10, B games to 20, C games to 30, D games to 100, and E games to 50, and the problem becomes much bigger.
The problem is that even though I'm making almost 2 moves per day, I have yet to make a move on game E, even after 12 days! Game D is going 6 full days per move (I only play if there are less than 3 days left, remember).
The days-per-move for each of the games is:
A: 1
B: 2
C: 4
D: 6
E: 29

One potential solution to this problem would be a two-tiered sorting/filtering mechanism. The first "group" of games would be sorted by games that have < X time left (1 day? user-defined setting?) The remaining "group" would be sorted by "percent of time left" or some other similar metric.

For an example of the "percent of time left" sorting, let's take our original example and also play games where "Percent time left" is <= 70% and a first "group" cutoff of 1 day (for the sake of brevity. Perhaps 50% is a better value). The Games Played ordering is by the ordering that they would be sorted by. Let's also change the play style so that a maximum of only 1 non-critical (> 1 day left) game is played per day:

Day Games Played Time remaining Percent Time Left
-------------------------------------------------------
1 A 1, 2, 4, 6, 29 100, 66, 80, 86, 97
2 A, B 1, 3, 3, 5, 28 100,100, 60, 71, 93
3 A, C 1, 2, 5, 4, 27 100, 66,100, 57, 90
4 A, D 1, 1, 4, 7, 26 100, 33, 80,100, 87
5 A, B 1, 3, 3, 6, 25 100,100, 60, 86, 83
6 A, C 1, 2, 5, 5, 24 100, 66,100, 71, 80
7 A, B 1, 3, 4, 4, 23 100,100, 80, 57, 77
8 A, D 1, 2, 3, 7, 22 100, 66, 60,100, 73
9 A, C 1, 1, 5, 6, 21, 100, 33,100, 86, 70
10 A, B, E 1, 3, 4, 5, 30, 100,100, 80, 71,100
11 A 1, 2, 3, 4, 29 100, 66, 60, 57, 97
12 A, D 1, 1, 2, 7, 28 100, 33, 40,100, 93


In this case, my moves-per-day is the same, 1.92.
The days-per-move for each of these games is (the numbers don't reflect the tables above, I've extended the tables for more accurate results):
A: 1
B: ~2.6
C: ~3.8
D: 4
E: ~12

The fast-moving games aren't really impacted at all, but the slower games have sped up considerably, at the expense of the medium-speed games. So even though it's a "slow" game, the 30-move game is being played, on average, once every 12 days. In essence, what sorting by "percentage of time left" does is bubble the slow games up to the top much faster, but still allows them to continue not being played if desired.

jurek: Oops, my numbers were off a bit; there are actually 279936 possible outcomes (I was lumping "equivalent" rolls like 6,1,1,1,1,1,1 with 6,6,6,6,6,6,6). Of these, 200130 are wins for white (71.5%).

mctrivia: Agreed, as the number of rolls and the freedom of movements go up, the odds tend to even out, but the claim by pauloaguia was that the starting odds for black-vs-white was the same for Backgammon and Ludo.

pauloaguia: Wrong!!
In Backgammon, there is an equal chance for white to go first as there is for black to go first.
In Ludo, white goes first every time, thus giving white a small advantage.

As an example, let's take a very simple case: the first player to get 4 or more points, taking alternate rolls of a single die. In this, we are guaranteed that there will be no more than 7 rolls (If both players continually roll 1's).
From this, it ends up that there are 176 roll outcomes. Of these outcomes, white wins 105 of them (just under 60%). Obviously, Ludo is much more complicated, but to say that it has the same dice-dependent odds as Backgammon is not correct.

Fencer: OK, thanks. I didn't see it in the list of member benefits, so I assumed it didn't exist for anyone.

This may have already been requested, but I would like to see a "Watched" list, where you can add and remove other players' games that you want to keep track of as a spectator.

wetware: Unfortunately, Pythagoras's sarcasm probably came off a little too straight-laced. That's one of the main problems with typed sarcasm--there's a very fine line separating it and something that sounds real. Although, I think his final suggestion of non-rated players not being able to play on Mondays kinda put it over the top.

buda_30: Any of the Gipf project games would be a great addition I think, but I'm not sure if they're available to play (a la copyright concerns). Can anyone shed any light on these particular games?

Czuch Chuckers: Funny how you just assumed wellywales uses IE...

Andre Faria: I'm certainly no checkers expert; I just used what he said in his announcement. Sorry for any confusion. :)

Matarilevich: That's precicely what Fencer is doing. In Chess, white moves first. In Shogi, Go, Pente, Checkers, etc black moves first. And so on and so forth.

Groucho: Of course. It would just be a request. Your opponent would have to OK the undo.

I would love to see the ability to request a move "undo" from your opponent. It has happened to me many times that I make a move, only to notice an hour or 5 later that it was really bad.
Perhaps this could be an option in the new game creation parameters?

mctrivia: IIRC, Fencer is in the process of implementing go, but to make the software to do the point/territory counting is basically one step away from making an AI to play go, so it's a non-trivial task to implement the finer points of the game.

andreas: I think the ability to have that could give information to the players.
Imagine an empty board with a white queen on a1 and a black rook on b2. The rook can obviously see itself and the queen can see the rook, but if you were to allow outside observers to see that the rook is visible to both players, then black could potentially become aware that her rook is under attack by a piece, when she normally wouldn't know this.
Obviously, there are other ways to deal with this (only show pieces which are mutually attacking each other, more complex yadda-yaddas, etc), but I really don't see how that would make watching an in-progress dark chess game any more exciting or worthwhile.

Fencer: By looking at his screen

headius: I agree with headius here. Even adding a modest Shogi variant such as Tori might garner even more interest in Shogi in general. Those members that feel Shogi is a little too bizarre to approach can get a better feel for the smaller 7x7 board. Go Shogi!