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A comment in the original article says it best: ... Changing the rules tends to neutralize acquired knowledge ... and beginning players like this because it levels the playing field.
Go baduk weiqi is still worth looking into for chess players.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any variant where both players play blind every other move or in the starting?
There's a 'fog of war' variant where you can only see the squares that a piece of yours could move to.
I captured a lot of game details and have them stored away, but I had to move onto something else shortly after, so I never explored it further.
DeepMind and Kramnik had an interesting paper a few months back exploring possible chess variants: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04374 The basic idea is to train AlphaZero on proposed variants, and look for ones that have fewer draws and a smaller advantage for white.
Interesting paper concept. I'll read it. I also notice Kramnik is the last-listed author in a group of four, the rest of whom work at DeepMind. Is this a new marketing "thing" in published corporate research?
I'm ignoring "vanity" authorship and other horrors.
This would avoid excessive opening preparation and steering opening to drawish positions.
Here's an idea (probably not original): simultaneous chess. Both players write down their moves and, once they have both committed, both moves are executed in parallel. If two moving pieces end up on the same square, both are eliminated. If one piece moves onto a square that has been vacated by an opponent's piece in the same move then no capture takes place. Addendum: One benefit of this variant is that it is comple…
Also, if you are going to write down moves, you can allow the players to move all of their pieces, too, like in Diplomacy.
A queen could capture a pawn next to the king, and a bishop could simultaneously move to prevent the king from capturing the queen, for example. A countermove could be to move a pawn between that bishop and that queen, and to have the king capture the queen.
⇒ I guess this multi-move variant would get highly complicated very soon. It might be better to follow diplomacy here and replace “If two moving pieces end up on the same square, both are eliminated” by “...same square, neither moves”, or maybe add “x supports y moving to square S”*?
Here's an idea (probably not original): simultaneous chess. Both players write down their moves and, once they have both committed, both moves are executed in parallel. If two moving pieces end up on the same square, both are eliminated. If one piece moves onto a square that has been vacated by an opponent's piece in the same move then no capture takes place. Addendum: One benefit of this variant is that it is comple…
With no way to block or capture a piece on the square it's attacking from, the first time the king is placed in check he has to move or be captured. If the king isn't completely surrounded, the attacker only wins if they successfully guess where (or if) the king will move. The endgame would include an element of reading the other player, like poker.
Off the top of my head - somehow creating new rules, especially socially-dependent or open-ended ones, on demand might work.
I asked a similar question a few months ago and got some interesting answers:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441073
Otherwise, I really liked this chess variant, although it seems near impossible to actually play:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Chess
Alice chess is a chess variant invented in 1953 by V. R. Parton which employs two chessboards rather than one,[a] and a slight (but significant) alteration to the standard rules of chess. The game is named after the main character "Alice" in Lewis Carroll's work Through the Looking-Glass, where transport through the mirror into an alternate world is portrayed on the chessboards by the after-move transfer of chess pieces between boards A and B.
Go baduk weiqi is still worth looking into for chess players.
Author of the linked post here. I've actually done more Go than Chess in the past 6 months - I enjoy it a lot. My dream is to find a game that captures what I love about both Go and Chess. I've seen many examples of how not to make that game, but my mind turns back to that question every now and then.