Mike Sherwin wrote: ↑Fri Oct 09, 2020 9:20 pm
A simple rule change would breathe new life into chess. Allow the king to castle out of check. It would allow much more aggression to the game.
I am surprised about the other answers, as they don't even address the biggest flaw, probably no chessplayers in this thread.
The possibility to castle out of check (if allowed) in real games would be so tiny anyway, that it defeats the purpose of a new variant.
I guess not more than once in several hundreds of games. You would also need to allow castling over covered squares and other pieces
to make sense.
At least chess programmers should welcome the change, since it greatly simplifies legality checking of castling moves
Id rather play a game such as musketeer chess, but possibly somewhat less elaborate (that variant has so many rules/pieces that it becomes difficult to remember everything, IMHO). Let's make up 4 pieces, most of which probably already exist:
Fortress: A rook that can also move one step diagonal.
Unicorn: A knight that can also move one step like a king.
Archbischop: a bischop that can move one square up/down and left/right.
Empress: A queen that can also move like a knight.
First black chooses one of those 4 pieces, and swaps one piece on the board for it (except the king). Then white does the same, but can't choose the same piece again. A player can choose NOT to swap anything. If both players don't swap, we have standard chess. Also white may not change or undo black's swap of course.
Combine this with Fischer Random chess for a huge chess variant:
960 starting positions, x 5 piece choices x 7 swap squares x 4 piece choices x 6 swap squares, if I'm not mistaken. That will give you 806.400 starting positions.
If there'd be a user interface that can handle this (If I remember correctly, Winboard can, with some configuring and fiddling), I'd possibly look into extending / deriving an engine from Rustic to play something like this. It actually wouldn't be very difficult to define the new pieces.
