> I think there may be a lot of neat similarities to chess and entrepreneurship, but ultimately chess is too controlled.
...I felt compelled to mention Go. In general, Go is much less constrained than Chess. The strategy plays on many axes: not only offense vs defense (as chess) but also territory guarding vs invasion, speed vs strength, and risk-taking vs conservative-waiting. In general, I would say Go has many more parallels with business (and life in general). I've recently been turning my passing interest in Go into a full-blown obsession, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative to Chess.
It's Othello squared. It's a fabulous game. It's intuitive, instead of rational. I lived in Japan for a year after college and played every year. It's hard to find people in the states that play and it takes a long time to play. The old saying goes, 'Two men sat down for a game of Go. That was yesterday'
If anyone plays Go and is in San Francisco, hit me up by email--would love to play!
As opposed to the live-play servers, Dragon Go is intended for a much more measured pace of play (the FAQ claims the average player makes 4 moves per game per week). As an added bonus, there's also an iPhone app. It's definitely not the same as playing in person, but it's currently how I get my fix.
I think the real benefit of this game is that it teaches you to read chess boards quickly. If you get good, you can glance at your opponents board and get a quick idea of things you can do in a few moves to help them.
Although strangely enough, I recalled the turtle board winning the game more often than the board that was appraised with a higher chance of winning.
I wonder why no one has implemented Bughouse as a massively popular webapp, I'd love to play that again.
Edit: Huh, apparently Bughouse is still 1v1, the 2v2 variant is called Crazyhouse. We never called it that back then, weird.
There are also some chess engines that can do it, including the one in Mac OS X, though I don't know if Apple's GUI offers access to it.
It's been at least a couple of decades since I've played bug house, so my memories are pretty hazy.
Yes you can. Very often the game ends when a player uses a new piece to checkmate.
More details here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bughouse_chess
There are no stalemates in this version.
Bughouse and crazyhouse are significantly more complex games (branching factor over 100 for Crazyhouse, even more for bughouse).
As far as your statement regarding branching factor increase can you point me to some references? Its not that I do not believe you I'm curious at what point the complexity begins to take off.
Poker, with its structural luck factor and money factor is by far the closest match. I think the variant that best mirrors it is tournament poker, MTTs especially. If you look at PNL graphs from MTT players, you will see they mirror startup PNL very well.