How about a variant in which the king is just a normal piece but moves the same way, except there is no such thing as checkmate? The objective is to capture all of your opponent's pieces? It would basically be anti-antichess. My brother (@V2chess) and I used to play this so much OTB.
OP idea sounds very interesting to me :)
> There are also no signs that any "designed" "variants" from this area would likely lift off as a standalone variant worth tracking with a rating.
There can't be "signs" since they don't exist yet, but I think there is a good REASON why worthwhile variants may appear (whether they lead to ratings or not). The reason is that games, just like any other cultural construct, are products of an evolutionary process.
So far the evolutionary process for chess variants has been extremely slow and limited. A few people have made random proposals, and they have had a hard time finding people to try (= "reproduce") their variants.
Here players would be able to DEFINE variants interactively and play them immediately. That would allow the diversity and the speed that the evolutionary process needs. When people stumble on something they enjoy (whether a wild variant or a slight variation on standard chess), they would try to improve it by making small changes. Features of different variants would be merged. Etc.
There could be a live list of variants, ranked by how much they have been played, and people would click the ones they want to play and be autopaired. The rules would be immediately understandable. In fact that's the criterion I would offer for a game to count as a chess variant: that it be immediately understood by an average chess player. "Just like chess, except that..."
I understand that the variant designer and the generalized chess play support would be a challenge, but it could be built progressively, as I have suggested.
And ten years from now, it can handle the current variants as particular cases, and Lichess proper and the experimental part can be merged into one huge chess variant tree with standard chess at the top :)
Even if you don't find it interesting, maybe someone else will, or will be prompted to think of something else that is related and ends up being done, on Lichess or elsewhere. Thanks.
There can't be "signs" since they don't exist yet, but I think there is a good REASON why worthwhile variants may appear (whether they lead to ratings or not). The reason is that games, just like any other cultural construct, are products of an evolutionary process.
So far the evolutionary process for chess variants has been extremely slow and limited. A few people have made random proposals, and they have had a hard time finding people to try (= "reproduce") their variants.
Here players would be able to DEFINE variants interactively and play them immediately. That would allow the diversity and the speed that the evolutionary process needs. When people stumble on something they enjoy (whether a wild variant or a slight variation on standard chess), they would try to improve it by making small changes. Features of different variants would be merged. Etc.
There could be a live list of variants, ranked by how much they have been played, and people would click the ones they want to play and be autopaired. The rules would be immediately understandable. In fact that's the criterion I would offer for a game to count as a chess variant: that it be immediately understood by an average chess player. "Just like chess, except that..."
I understand that the variant designer and the generalized chess play support would be a challenge, but it could be built progressively, as I have suggested.
And ten years from now, it can handle the current variants as particular cases, and Lichess proper and the experimental part can be merged into one huge chess variant tree with standard chess at the top :)
Even if you don't find it interesting, maybe someone else will, or will be prompted to think of something else that is related and ends up being done, on Lichess or elsewhere. Thanks.
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