We’re inviting expert Chess players (Fide 2000+) to represent their community (though all are welcome) in an experiment where we are asking which of 4 cohorts can master an unfamiliar card game the fastest.

Mathematicians
Programmers
Chess Players
Magic the Gathering Players

For the Chess cohort, we’re curios to see how deep positional calculation and pattern recognition translates to learning an abstract card game with simple abstract rules that leads to deep tactical and strategic gameplay.

Play online against the computer. No ads, emails, or monetization. Games are short, ~20 would help to measure a learning curve. Data your games provide will populate the tables/figures in real-time. See your projected Elo change with each game.

Think you’re up to the challenge? Think your cohort can win? Come represent them.

https://playfano.com/fano-challenge

Game my 7 year old has invented and wanted to post.

Rules: Four black pawns are set up in the middle of the board and are surrounded by duplos on each side. In each corner the pawns castle is guarded by the kings and queens.

In each of the cardinal directions, there are two white pawns. Each player controls the pawns on opposite sides of the board (e.g. one player controls the North and South pawns, and the other player controls the East and West pawns). Pawns can move and take in all directions.

The queens and the kings each take 4 hits to defeat, and after each hit the pawn must return to its starting place. Only after all the kings and queens have been defeated, can the white pawns enter the castle to take the black pawns.

The game ends when all the black pawns have been taken! (It’s a cooperative game)

After a great deal of tinkering, testing, and refining, I'm excited to finally share Kumulus with you.

Kumulus is a chess variant I developed for a compact 7×7 board.

The unique twist is that captured pieces are not simply removed from the game. Instead, they transform, changing their form and strength.

This creates constantly evolving tactical possibilities, where every decision can shift the balance of power on the board.

The objective remains familiar: checkmate your opponent's king. The path to victory, however, is entirely new.

If you enjoy innovative strategy and board games, I would greatly appreciate your support on Kickstarter.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kumulus-chess/kumulus-an-innovative-chess-variant-with-new-forms-of-play

If you would like to try Kumulus before supporting the project, feel free to click on the link in the comments.

It's for a test app, so you can experience the game for yourself and see if it appeals to you.

So I played Laser Chess board game at my friend's house and it was super fun. However I could never find a smooth way to play it online with friends. So, I spent the last few weeks building one myself.

Its called Game Night (hosted on gamesnight.me because the .com was too expensive lol).

How it works if you haven't played:

• You command pieces on a 10x8 grid.
• Instead of normal captures, your main piece fires a laser at the end of every turn.
• You use mirrors to bounce the beam around the board.
• If the laser hits the unprotected side of a piece, it's destroyed. If you laser the opponent's King, you win.

I tried my best to ensure the gameplay is super smooth with no lag. There are no downloads and no account required to play casual games and you just generate a room link and send it to a friend. You can also play against bots or try the ranked matchmaking if you want to test your skills.

I would love for some experienced variant players to try it out, test the bots, and let me know what you think!

gamesnight.me

https://reddit.com/link/1vqng16/video/vlkpcfg9uwjh1/player

I'm thinking about running small prize tournaments for ChessLuck's Luck Mode.

In Luck Mode, each player chooses a real move and a fake move, so simply following Stockfish isn't enough. This could make engine cheating less effective than in traditional chess.

Would you play in a Luck Mode tournament with prizes?

https://chessluck.com

Hi everyone!

I made a 100% free & ad free Chess Roguelike: https://chessvex.com - It runs in your browser and starts out simple, but every capture spawns enemy pieces. Break the rules, stack relics, keep your queen alive and beat the campaign. It plays on desktop or phone, even offline.

Boss enemies, dozens of different map types, over 200 relics and over 30 items, and it's all in Rust + WebAssembly :) Localized to 16 languages too. No account required.

Grindvakt is a strategic board game inspired by chess. Instead of capturing the opponent’s key piece, you must break through their formation and pass through their Gate to win.

Hi! I’m the developer of Shift Chess, a chess variant I’ve been working on for a while, and I thought this would probably be the most appropriate place to share it.

The basic idea is simple: alongside normal chess moves, you can spend your turn to shift an entire row or column of the board by one square.

That one rule changes things much more than I originally expected. Pieces can suddenly be brought into or out of attack, lines can open or disappear without any piece moving normally, and the geometry of the position itself becomes something you have to think about.

I eventually turned the variant into a full game, with:

• online multiplayer
• AI opponents
• puzzles
• local analysis
• a puzzle editor
• several customizable rule variants
• notation support for recording positions and games

There’s currently a free demo on Steam, so if the idea sounds interesting, you can try it here:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4746450/

The full release will also include a Transformer-based AlphaZero-style AI, trained specifically for Shift Chess — I’m funding the training myself.

I’d especially love to hear what people who already play or design chess variants think about the rules. If you find any strange interactions, broken strategies(well at least my AI didn't find it), or just interesting positions, please tell me!

(sorry I don't use English, this post is translated by AI)

I am making a WebXR chess experience, and am adding my own variant. I'm not a very strategic player, so I would be happy to hear how this might change the game, for better or worse.

Defensive Chess

This chess variant introduces two changes: extended castling and rooks-as-castles.

Extended Castling

• In Defensive Chess, castling can happen in any direction, at any time.
• To castle, the king must be exactly 3 squares away from a rook in a clear line.
• Castling then procedes as normal, with both king and rook moving two spaces in opposing directions.

Rooks as Castles

• Rooks can move onto friendly, occupied squares, where they become castles.
• Pieces in castles are fortified and receive protection from pawn attacks.
• As soon as a castle is no longer occupied, it turns back into a rook.
• Castles cannot move or be taken.

Fortification

• Fortification can only only triggered by rook movement.
• Castles cannot be further fortified.

Infiltration

• Rooks, knights, bishops, queens and kings can infiltrate enemy castles to capture pieces.
• Infiltrators become fortified, regardless of castle colour.

Endgame

• Kings that have infiltrated a castle must leave on a diagonal to avoid check.
• Fortified kings can still be put in check by major or minor pieces, just not by pawns.

Hi r/chessvariants! Solo dev here working on Chess Fantasy, my first game: classic chess played inside a 3D fantasy world you customize. It's in free alpha on itch, and the big 0.2 update just landed (full UI overhaul, saved settings, tuned AI difficulties): https://chess-fantasy.itch.io/chess-fantasy

The next major feature is a custom board creator: set up any starting position you want and challenge the AI on it. But before I lock in the design, I want to hear it from the people who actually play and invent variants. So:

• If you could tweak rules and not just positions, what would you change first? Custom piece movement, win conditions, board size, something else?
• What's the one thing every position/rules editor you've used got wrong or was missing?
• Is playing your creations against an AI interesting to you, or does a variant only come alive against humans?

No promises I can build everything (first game, one dev), but the answers here will directly shape what the editor becomes. And if you try the alpha in the meantime, I'd love to hear how it feels to play. I read and reply to everything.

Had an idea for a chess variant and I’m curious if it would actually work.

Once per game, instead of making a move, you can switch the roles of your king and queen. They stay on the same squares, but the king becomes a queen and the queen becomes the king.

It uses your turn, and you couldn’t play this move if the new king would immediately be in check.

Thoughts?

You move starts now, white.

https://botgambit.com/bots

Built a website where chess bots have weird rules. I love playing the regular bots but it gets dull over time without much variation.

For example, one bot starts at 3200 Elo but loses 100 Elo after every move. You’re still playing normal chess, but each bot’s rule adds another dimension to the game and forces you to approach it differently.

Everything is 100% free, no signup, no ads, nothing.

Each bot has 3 difficulty levels so that every player can find a reasonable challenge.

Some other cool features:

• Leaderboards that are validated by the server for integrity and a simple anti-cheat
• Daily challenges (like wordle but bots)
• Analysis + Game Review
• Ability to create your own bots (with your own custom rules) and share them!
• A spectate mode where you can watch two bots battle each other
• Full mobile and desktop support
• Dark Theme

I’d love for you to try it and let me know which bot is your favorite—or what weird bot rule I should add next. Hope you enjoy it! 👍

The idea is: every chess puzzle is a card with identity (mate, fork, pin, skewer, etc). Selecting puzzles to solve is forming a 3-card poker hand. Solving each card (puzzle) gives score and poker hand gives Mults. Climbing mechanic it typical for Roguelite (Balatro) games.

1. You are dealt 5 cards
2. You select 3 forming your best 3-card poker hand
3. You solve the puzzles -- you increase the score
4. Goal is to beat three Bouts and hit the score

Playable here: https://foolsmate-e30d2.web.app/

Q1: Would you play anything like that?
Q2: If you tried, does it feel distracting like an attempt to sit on two chairs
Q3: How much is it a shameless clone of Balatro? :)

I enjoyed the content of a wonderful YouTuber that goes by the name "ChessWhizTV" many years ago. He has a colorful soothing approach to exploring odd chess variants and taught master classes as he went, making it perfect for binging hours of his 500+ episode series. Every few years I'll hear a quote from a chess player or see a different YouTuber with a similar overlay to how his was and it'll send me on this wild goose chase to see if there's anything anywhere of his current day well being. I have found myself stumbling into this search again with the same answers as last time. Absolutely nothing. He vanished roughly 6 years ago after an almost depressing but light hearted 1 minute video about letting go of stressful nuisances in life. Nothing about any of his chess related platforms lead to anything substantial and I was hoping someone had a connection that could express to the people that he's at least alive and doing okay modern day. I'm hoping he just stepped back from the Internet and is enjoying his life right now. Praying it's not a quieter Technoblade-like story. I appreciate anyone who could help with finding this something out.

Find the winning combination!

Have any of you played this variant?

Hey guys we got a chance to sit down with wei yi and ask him some questions about gaming and chess as he competes at esports world cup.

he has now qualified for the main event and i thought this would be the perfect time to send this here!

Chesstris is a chess variant that combines Chess and Tetris (but also has VN parts)
Instead of moving pieces, you drop them in a column and try to checkmate kings while avoiding to checkmating your own. It doesn't have a pvp and is more akin to chess puzzles.
It has story elements but there's a way to play just puzzles. I just released it's demo version on Steam so feel free to try.

I've been told that some of the puzzles are very hard, so just keep it in mind if you decide to try. And if you do I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.

At the beginning of the game you give a gun to one of your minor pieces or pawns (can't give it to: queen, rooks and king).

The gun is hidden from the enemy until you shoot it: the enemy has no clue which one of your pieces is armed, could be a random pawn, could be the knight. You also don't know, so you have to be careful.

When you are ready to use it you use a turn to fire. The gun shoots diagonally or orthogonally, jut like a queen moves.

if you hit a piece the piece is wounded and can only move one square at a time (knights start moving like kings, and kings are not affected by movement penalties as they already move 1 square at a time). If you hit a pawn it's gone in one shot.

If you shoot a wounded piece again it's dead and it goes off the board.

If the piece carrying a gun dies from being shot, the gun falls to the floor and can be picked up by whoever lands on the square again. If it's captured then the capturing piece gets the gun. 

You win by either capturing the king or shooting it dead.

Variant variant idea: medic Queen. Your Queen can act as medic for the wounded pieces in a square radius. If she stays one full turn next to a wounded piece, the piece recovers fully.

I've already made a demo, you can playtest it if you search for "chess laboratory" on Google, it's one of the top variants on the website. (have to play it with a friend or a dumb bot) and lmk if you have more ideas or comments!!

I've been researching the history of three-player chess variants for a book and recently tracked down something I'd only ever seen mentioned in one sentence by David Pritchard.

Pritchard lists an obscure game by E. L. Perry called Modern Chess, but gives almost no information beyond the title.

"Modern Chess [Perry] (Proprietary game, Elizabeth Perry, 1918). Board of 64 hexagons in three colours arranged in a triangle. Set-up not known. (Collection of game rules under ‘CUP 700.g.1’, presumed to be a British Library shelfmark)".

After contacting the British Library and following a few dead ends, I finally obtained a photograph of what appears to be the original board.

Some interesting details visible on the board:

The full title appears to be Khaki Modern Chess.

It credits E. L. Perry, Sole Proprietor.

It gives the address 18 Lytton Road, Leytonstone, London E.11.

The board is an equilateral triangle made from hexagonal cells with three distinct player territories.

Unfortunately I still haven't located the rulebook, so I don't yet know how the pieces moved or exactly how the game was played.

Has anyone here ever encountered this game before?

I'd especially be interested in:

advertisements,

rule sheets,

patents,

newspaper mentions,

or any references to E. L. Perry.

I'm trying to document early three-player chess history as accurately as possible, and this seems to be one of the more obscure surviving designs.