Charles,

I think you might be confusing two ideas:

1. We want to present information in a way that's easy for the reader to find and understand.

2. We want to tell the truth in all articles, as much as possible.

Now, Chinese Chess and Korean Chess (both played on a 9 x 10 grid of dots) certainly LOOK LIKE the game known in the West as "chess" (played on an 8 x 8 grid of squares). You win, if your opponent can't stop you from capturing his king. You have some soldiers who only go forward; there's a 'horse' and a 'castle'. (I helped write the Korean Chess article, by the way.)

To satisfy idea #1, the easiest and quickest thing to do is to call these 'chess variants'. This is using "variation" in the sense of "something similar, something that does the same thing but in a different way".

To satisfy idea #2, we MUST DISCUSS the issue of how old the various types of chess games are. Now last I heard, their origins were lost in antiquity, and no one individual is credited as inventing any of these games in a particular year. It's not even clear how Europe got its 8 x 8 board (from India, I guess).

But please don't misunderstand: calling the Chinese and Korean chess games "variants" says NOTHING about which came first, nor does it make a claim that one came first and gave rise to the other. It's just a quick way of saying, "If you like Western Chess, try these games, too!" :-)

Ed Poor Master of the Neutral Point of View