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YouTube - Shut Up & Sit Down - Nine Easy Ways to Make Chess Fun
Summary: Playing chess is a bummer. It’s frequently devoid of surprise, charm, and reward. It’s a combination of two things: hard calculation of the state of the board, and a cruel fight to the death. If you and your opponent aren’t well-matched, the lower ranked person doesn’t have any chance at winning. He doesn’t feel “enlarged” in the same way as when he plays Go. When he plays chess, he feels like either he or his opponent had a horrible time slowly getting suffocated.
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YouTube - Shut Up & Sit Down - Nine Easy Ways to Make Chess Fun
They show chessvariants.com.
My impression is that he likes variants because it cuts down on the memorization advantage of that people who have when they’ve played a lot of chess already, so it’s just calculation. If both people are new to the variation then it’s just about who can calculate better. And the variation makes players focus more on the experience/story that’s unfolding than about who is winning. He says he doesn’t feel as bad when he loses. He doesn’t feel like it’s the “IQ test” that normal chess has come to be seen as. “It no longer feels like me and my opponent are stoically weighing our chessticles to determine once and for all who is the better human.”
Asymmetric variants:
Peasant revolt - One player has all their pawns and their king, the other player has the knights and bishops and their king.
Horde chess - One player has 36 pawns (no king), the other player has their normal chess setup.
Monster chess - White has four pawns and the king, black has the normal setup. For every move black makes, white can move twice.
Atomic chess - When a piece dies, all other pieces within 1 square also die. Games are over very quickly.
Stealth bomber chess - Like atomic chess but players write down which pieces will explode before the game starts.
Rifle chess - Like normal chess but pieces don’t move when they take another piece.
Alice chess - Like normal chess (normally played on two boards but can be played on two half-boards) but when a piece captures another piece, it moves to the other board, and only comes back when it moves again. Moves between boards are only legal if the space on the other board is empty.
Bughouse chess - Played with four people (two teams of two) and two boards. Any pieces you capture can be brought on by your teammate as reinforcements.
Synchronistic chess - Both players decide on their move at the same time and make their move at the same time. So it’s like the WEGO system in Combat Mission.
5D chess (the computer game)
Chesh (iOS only) - You don’t know what any of the pieces do, and can only find out by trying to move them. But once you commit to moving a piece (revealing its available moves) you have to move it, even if that means killing one of your own pieces.
Really Bad Chess (mobile) - Normal rules of chess, you play against AI, but both players have scrambled setups. When you start, you have better pieces than the AI, but as you rank up, the quality of the pieces goes more in the favor of the AI.
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