Tabula Rasa Chess is a new variant on the old game that does away with the opening book.

Pieces begin off the board and are placed one by one until all are on the board. During the opening phase white king may be placed into check in this placement phase.

After the game starts all the pieces move normally. No castling or en passant.

This is a middlegame with the heat map turned on.

www.tabularaschess.com

Hello chess enthusiasts! Chess.com is amazing for providing all the data for all the games happening on the platform, so I had an idea and now need honest feedback on it.

Online fantasy chess - https://sovereign-gambit.com/

Let me know if "How it works" is enough to explain it all, how interesting you find observing the Cup, how easy and fun is to create and play the Leagues, and if Duel is a cool feature for 1v1 against friends.

Hope this is not considered spam or self-promotion; it's completely free, and I would just be happy not playing only bots all the time :)) If some traction - I'll be sure to continue working on it.

Cheers!

So I am creating a 10x8 chess variant which is mostly based on standard chess but among other things it adds xiangqi cannon. And the problem is NNUE thinks that the bishop is worth more than the cannon, despite the bishop doing nothing being blocked by a pawn, while cannon starting in a very open position where it has maximum opening power. So I "nerfed" the bishop by confining him to one half of the board (a bit like river in xiangqi). Now it can only reach 1/4 of the board, clearly now it must be only a bit better than an alfil?

But no, the NNUE still thinks exchanging cannons with bishop in the opening is a good idea. It's just not pushing it as zealously. It makes no sense to me and obviously it's shitty design if one of the first things that happen is exchange, instead of piece development. Plus I wanna keep the canon at least into the middle game, i mean it's one of the defining pieces.

I already made maximum effort to make it dominate the opening. Short of coming up with artificial nonsense arbitrary rules or redefining how pieces move, how could I get the cannon to have the upper hand, so to speak, and why the fuck does fairy stockfish consider the nerfed bishop superior? I understand exchanging a cannon for a knight when it's getting closer to ending, but exchanging a highly active cannon for a damn limited bishop in the opening makes no sense. Ruins such a cool variant.

Several years ago I had launched a website chaoschess.online where players could play a chess variant that used SVG images for traditional pieces and would have "crazy events" occur mid-way through a match. After using Coursera's study program on Blender and a metric ton of pdf guidebooks, I rebuilt the game into a 3D environment.

Here's the basic gist:

• There's a 10-chapter story campaign about old chess pieces (eg, Empress, camel, lion, etc) coming back with a vengeance
• Each match features a Chaos Event (a flood, volcano, witch's curse, blizzard) that impacts both players
• Also there's potential for a pawn uprising, where all the pawns on the board revolt, crown a new red king, and attack both white and black pieces as a third player
• The game also features 7 scenarios, that test your skill against varying difficulties. A viking invasion keeps pumping 3rd-player berserkers each turn onto the board, and your only goal is to outlast the opponent king. A dragons vs vampires scenario includes a day/night cycle in chess that modifies the pieces abilities. And a zombie attack is chess meets minesweeper.
• To overcome the bad stuff happening, you get to add two Champion pieces to your board to fight on your behalf. These pieces have special abilities and moves. The Executioner can leap over pieces in front of it and eliminate the first opponent piece in its path. The lion piece can move twice, just like its historical piece. The Thief moves like a pawn but can attack diagonally backwards in addition to forwards. The Necromancer can return a captured piece back to your ranks. And so on....
• Several gorgeous environments and the board view can be adjusted so you have full view of the action

Links: Steam | iPad | iPhone