Any Chess Variant fans in the house?

[jrients]

E-mail voting has opened in the Chess Variant Pages 44 Square Contest (http://www.chessvariants.com/44.dir/index.html). Voting is open to everyone. If you dig variant chess, please consider checking out the entries and voting. (And if you like playing chess variants and have never checked out The Chess Variant Pages (http://www.chessvariants.com/Gindex.html) then you are in for a treat.)

N.B.: I am a participant in the contest, but this is NOT an attempt to stuff the ballot box. Please vote for your favorite variants.

[Rutherford]

Bughouse is really the only varient I've played, and I've enjoyed it a lot.

[Slice]

When I used to play on the Internet Chess Club I was always playing kriegspiel. In this variant you can't see your opponent's pieces, only your own. The only additional information you get is when there is a possible capture by a pawn and when you are in check. Krieg is a pain in the ass to try and play F2F (you need a 3rd person as an intermediary) but is perfect for online play.

[Elbast]

Strip- and Shot-chess. Preferably combined.





















What? :D

[Pilgrim]

I'm a fan of Omega Chess, Proteus Chess, Tile Chess and Knightmare Chess.

[Thierry]

I liked Yalta with my two brothers.

http://www.kandaki.com/CM-images/Yalta.gif

[Gabriel]

This post is kind of off topic, but the thread title reminded me of a moment of fun in a RPG several years ago.

I had a character who played chess a lot. When he wasn't flying a fighter and blasting aliens, he was typically in a pilot's lounge on the carrier starship playing chess. Of course, other characters in the game weren't as calm or interested in such pursuits.

So, one day my character is sitting and enjoying his game of chess (against an AI in this instance), when someone else came over and cried out "RANDOM CHESS!" They scrambled the pieces around the board, and then stood there expectant of my character's wrath.

I had my character look at the board, proclaim the new setup more interesting, and convince the AI to continue the game with the new setup. The chess randomizer character sighed in exasperation and wandered off, and my character enjoyed his game anyway.

For a while it was a catchphrase. Anytime something off the wall and borderline incoherent would happen, we would cry out "RANDOM CHESS" to commemorate the event. And for a while, my character would periodically play a random chess variant to unwind after combat sorties.

Sorry about this completely immaterial bit of personal trivia.

[Mildaene]

Kung-fu Chess (http://www.kungfuchess.com) has to be the best variant I ever played. Careful, it's addictive, too.

-Mildaene.

[Vitriol]

The name of the only variant I've played escapes me. In it two people play one another while the other one to four people create altered rules for all the pieces at the start of the game, within certain parameters. The two players then play one another and attempt to disover the rules as they play. You move by asking 'can I move this piece here?'. If you can, you have to move it. Can anyone identify it? I think it had a one-word name.

[snafubar]

I've played <i>Sceptre 1027 A.D.</i>, a version of chess where some of the pieces have different moves, depending on the terrain they're on. It's a 2-4 player variant game. It's a hard to find game, I've only seen 2 copies of it.

I own Knightmare Chess I & II, but have never played them.

The best description I can paraphrase was about Alcoholic's Chess. In this, the value of the piece was a correspondingly stronger amount of alcohol, which the capturing player must drink when he takes a piece. The entry in the book went on to say that one person won a game of it with "... a brilliant queen sacrifice at the beginning of the game." :)

[ReallyBored]

I played a lot of bughouse in HS and it was pretty fun. Also silly, as games tended to occasion the random
"I need a knight."
"How much?"
"Now!"
*hand over a knight*
*opponent gets a queen*
"WTF! not that much!"
"Umm, that's why I asked"
exchanges.

I don't know if this counts as a variant, but the bughouse games and most fast clocked games (2 minute chess!) were played under a "speed chess rules" variant. Basically, you don't call checks and all moves are legal after your opponent hits his clock to end his move (within reason, anyway. mostly it was that checks aren't called and moving through check/ignoring check/exposing a check were perfectly legal if not caught).

A couple more I don't remember the names of. One was just randomized starting positions and kinda crappy. The other was sort of reversed. The setup was the normal, but pawns moved towards you (ie, pawns promoted on their first move, but you had to get things out of the way).

[Scoundrel]

I like a varient called Pole (or Pillar) Chess.

The only varient is the addition of an extra piece on both sides called a pole or pillar. It moves like a queen, but can neither attack or be attacked, essentially acting as a blocker.

There's also an old computer game called "laser chess", where the kings is are laser cannons, and the object is to either capture or zap your opponant's laser. Each piece has different reflecting surfaces that you can use to bank your laser shots off of. A laser shot counts as a move, though so you've got to time things just right.

[bv728]

I loves me some Kriegspiel, but havn't played in years.

[teucer]

chessvariants.com variants can sometimes blur the line between "chess variant" and "boardgame having no relation to chess at all." It's a great site - I've submitted a game to a contest of theirs myself, with kickass ascii-art boards that they rendered in Zillions - but not really limited to chess.

I'm a xiangqi player, by the way, but not a chess player at all.

[jrients]

Originally posted by teucer
I've submitted a game to a contest of theirs myself, with kickass ascii-art boards that they rendered in Zillions - but not really limited to chess.

Do you have a link to your submission? Or just tell me the name and I'll look it up myself.

I'm a xiangqi player, by the way, but not a chess player at all.

I love xiangqi. Too bad I suck at it.