Chess variants for people who hate chess

Developed by my gf who vehemently hates chess, my friend who goes to chess club with me who moderately hates chess, and myself who hates chess a normal amount

Several people have played chess over the years, but most people who try it out hate it. This is because the base game sucks. It’s basically impossible to avoid blundering, your opponent is better than you in 100% of games, and the horse moves in a confusing way. Here I will lay out some variants of chess that might make the game actually fun.

If you weren’t aware, people have been playing variants of chess for quite a while. Some variants have fairy pieces and some have more than two players. Often there will be unconventional starting positions, extra pieces, or asymmetrical pieces.

Calvinchess

Based on calvinball, two players starting with a regular chess setup take turns making whatever moves they’d like whether or not they’re traditionally legal.

This variant was also on some level inspired by the famous game of stockfish v chatGPT, in which chatGPT doesn’t know how to play chess:

This is a great one because you don’t have to worry about making ‘bad’ or ‘illegal’ moves. Some of my favorite techniques in this are moving a knight an extra square beyond normal, en passanting from across the board, and moving bishops like they’re rooks just to feel something. It’s good to sprinkle in normal moves as you go just to keep some kind of structure. After a bit of playing you’ll find that the game becomes almost collaborative, with both players participating in a shared creative process.

I believe this is the only mode of chess where I’ve seen my gf laugh while playing it, and possibly the only one where she’s even smiled.

Torus Chess

EDIT: This one actually already existed, I wasn’t the first to come up with it. Feel free to skip down to the next one.

Two players play on two connected boards that represent a torus. That is, each edge of the board is like a portal to the opposite edge. Each player has the normal pieces,¹ plus an additional row of pawns behind their pieces that move only in the opposite direction.

Torus chess starting position. Each row of pawns has five rows between them and the nearest row of opposing pawns.

The edges of the board are linked to their matching color — red to red and purple to purple. The pawns on white’s row 3 only move down, and when they pass row 1 they teleport up to black’s row 8. Pawns are promoted when they’ve moved seven rows forward, i.e., when they reach the starting row of the opposite color’s pieces. Bishops go crazy in this gamemode. Follow the forward right diagonal from white’s f4 bishop: g5, h6, wrap around to a7, b8, cross to black’s c1, d2, e3… it eventually wraps all the way back around to where it started. Additionally, note that the rooks are on immediately adjacent squares and therefore begin the game already connected.

A torus

I didn’t realize it at the time I developed it, but torus chess is an extension of the extant cylinder chess, where just the left and right sids of the board are connected.

Cylinder chess, via Wikipedia. A physical torus-shaped chess board might be harder to construct and play on.

The advantage of this chess variant is that for a while both players willl spend most of their energy figuring out what pieces can go where, and realizing that actually one player has been in check for a while without anyone noticing, and what should we do about that, that nobody will be subjected to the usual kind of chess thinking. It’s much more egalitarian that way.

I’ll acknowledge that this one is probably the most like normal chess and therefore the worst, because I developed it out of my own head without the input from anyone who really hates chess.

Roleplaying Chess

Have you ever wanted to play chess but found that the normal game’s story mode is too bland and cliche? Roleplaying chess solves that problem. Rather than treat the game objects as tools for playing a structured game with defined rules, tools, and decisions, you treat them more like dolls or action figures and play out a scene on the board.

Here’s an example of this in very poor taste from chess club. In our defense, chess club is held at a local bar and we were a few drinks down.

Chesskers

I told my dad I was writing this post, and he told me about a variant he invented with his friend at summer camp as a kid. In chesskers (portmanteau of chess-checkers) each pawn moves diagonally, like a checker, except they don’t jump to capture like in checkers, they capture normally like in chess, it’s just that they all move diagonally instead of straight forward. When they get to the end, he said, they become a king — no, a queen — wait, definitely a king. I tried to ask if these kings were like checkers kings, basically chesskers pawns that move backwards, or like additional chess kings, but at that point he had wandered out of the room, muttering only “you make up your own rules about chesskers…”

One shudders to imagine what chesskers en passant looks like.

Super Chess

Ok, you know Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe?

A 3x3 board of 3x3 TTT boards. Placing a mark in one board determines where the opponent plays next. For example, if I go first and place a mark in center board, in the top left square, then the next move must be made somewhere in the top left board, and so on.

UTTT board after playing center board top left square to top left board bottom right square. X has to play in the bottom right board.

Super chess, my gf explained dreamily after waking up from a nap wherein super chess was conceived, is like that but you have an 8x8 grid of normal chess boards.

The first player gets to choose any board to play on. Say they start with e4 (kings pawn forward two spaces). The second player then has to play a move in their color on the board corresponding to e4 in the larger array of boards.² Ignore turn order on each individual board; it’s possible (indeed, nearly unavoidable) that some of the 64 games will start with a move by black or have a stretch of moves all made by the same side without the opposing player getting a move in edgewise.

If a board reaches checkmate, it can no longer be played on, and being sent to play on that board means you can play any legal move on any board. The game can be played to one checkmate, five checkmates, or, for the real marathon chessers, until every game reaches an end. In the final case, the victor of the Super Chess game is whoever won more of the 64 boards.

Stacking Chess

Similar to roleplaying chess, in stacking chess the goal is not to play chess but to stack all the pieces and pawns as high as you can. Rather than dolls, the game objects are reduced to oddly shaped toy blocks. I suggest placing the rook on the bottom, it’s a nice flat base to build on, but try different things and see how high you can get them.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading about My Strange Chess Modes. I hope that if any of these appeal to you that you get a chance to try them out. I might do another one of these in the future if I come up with more fun variant ideas. Please also feel free to share any of your own ideas for new variants or modifications to the ones I’ve listed here.

CHESS ON!

1. If you don’t know big brain chess terms, I use ‘piece’ to mean all non-pawn objects on the board, not just any thing that you might casually call a game piece.

2. The space that a piece/pawn moves to determines where the next player plays, not where it moved from.