What if you had a piece that was a rook sometimes and a knight sometimes? Ooh, that could be good.
As I continue my leisurely stroll through the fallow, yet fertile fields of chess variants, I’m finding a few fascinating oddities. For one thing, the field seems to be a lot less active than it was ten years ago. The Chess Variant Pages is still on the Web, but if you click through to their “Variant of the Month” page, you discover that nobody has even bothered to nominate a variant of the month since 2006.
My guess: smartphones. The kind of geeky guys who think chess variants are cool are mostly the kind of geeky guys who like downloading apps to their smartphones. I guess I’m the exception. The only app I’ve ever downloaded was Pandora, and that’s so I can listen to music while I’m at the gym.
But then, I lost interest in chess variants ten years ago too. Here’s another theory: Inventing variants is easy. Playing them well is a lot harder. And the more variants there are, the less likely you are to master any of them.
Even so, the possibilities are endlessly intriguing. Using a standard chess board — or maybe one that’s 8×10 or 10×10 at most — you can staff the players’ armies with a huge variety of dynamic and mind-boggling pieces. And if you want to try out these pieces in actual game-play, it’s easy — Read the rest of this entry »