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Here's an episode of Extra Credits about "Perfect Imbalance" on Penny Arcade. While I appreciate that the topic of game balance is getting covered, I don't think the arguments hold up.
First it makes these two points, which I agree with:
1) The two sides in Chess are similar enough that we can call the game symmetric. ALSO, Chess requires a huge amount of memorization to play, and he wishes that you could play in a more adaptive way and have memorization be less important.
2) Starcraft requires a huge amount of APM click speed to play at a high level, and only players who are super great at that really get to innovate in the strategy space (also bad players playing against bad players can get away with more strats). He wishes that thinking about new strategies had more relative importance to the common player than high APM does.
I have posted and spoken many times about those exact two issues, so I agree. But there is then some strange leap lof logic happens. The problem of how "solved" parts of those games can feel at times is claimed to be BECAUSE they are well-balanced. The problems involved are actually 0% because the games are well-balanced. Well-balanceness is a wonderful property and should not be blamed for these problems.
Chess
Chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer also agreed that Chess had become too rigid and that memorization played too large of a role. He wanted Chess to be a game that reward moment-to-moment decisions more, strokes of genius more, adaptability more, even general grasp of fundamentals more, and memorization less. To achieve this, he created Chess960. The starting position of the pieces are randomized (according to a few rules) and then mirrored on the other side, so the game is still symmetric. He strived to keep the "perfect balance" of Chess while addressing the problem. I think it's a great idea.
The same problem that bothered Fischer and Extra Credits bothered me too. In addition that problem, the problem of too many draws bothered me, as did the slippery slope nature of the game causes it to end with conceding which is kind of anti-climactic. And in addition to that, I think asymmetric games are just more interesting than symmetric ones. So to address all of those issues, I developed Chess 2.
Chess 2 has 6 different armies (for asymmetry, creates lots of matchups) and a "midline rule" that
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