
One dimensional Chess Variants - fogus
http://www.chessvariants.com/shape.dir/onedim.html
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mquander
I have a couple of drinks worth of experience with a number of entertaining
variants, which have no official name that I'm aware of: (EDIT: The first is
"progressive chess" and there are a few different rule sets for handling
checks: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_chess>)

\- Accelerating chess. White gets 1 move, Black gets 2 moves, White gets 3
moves, and so on, until someone wins. Rule to make it not suck: You can't put
someone in check during your intermediary moves. This involves more skill than
you might expect, and if your opponent is an adept defender at the end of his
turn(s), it can be surprisingly hard to mate without putting the enemy in
check, even with 5, 6, or 7 moves at your disposal. Sometimes you will find an
extremely clever combination and feel very special.

\- "Camelot." You can jump your knight on top of your rook, at which point it
can move like either a knight or a rook. If you like, you can jump it back off
afterward. If someone captures it, they capture both. _Bonus carnage rule:_
You can move it like a rook AND proceed to jump the knight off in the same
turn. This leads to hilariously powerful and unbelievably bizarre mate
threats.

\- Additional rule that works well with Camelot to add variety: X-ray bishops.
Your bishop can move through enemy pieces and capture a piece which would
normally be concealed by a pin. I bet you think this is a dumb ability but try
it out. You have to be careful not to get mated on move 2.

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adw
First is Scotch chess.

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mquander
Yep, so it is! Edited my post.

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johnwatson11218
When I was in college my friends and I came up with a chess variant that used
the dice from Risk. You played chess normally but if you didn't like the move
that your opponent made you could 'challenge' it using the dice. Since you
were challenging a legitimate move you would roll the two red dice and the
defender would roll the three white ones. Whoever had the higher total would
win. This meant that if you put the other player in check you still had to
actually capture the king because they could challenge the actual capture and
keep the game going.

I think that if you lost the roll not only did you have to take your move back
but you lost your turn as well. I remember it favored a style of play in which
you could take your queen and start attacking pieces on the opponents back
row. If they tried to capture it you could get lucky on the roll and keep
attacking.

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adw
This reminds me a little of the combinatorial game theory game done on Go
endgames: fascinating but impractical!

There are basically three major chesses; western, Xiangqi and Shogi, and three
popularish Western variants (Chess960, suicide and bughouse). All of them are
decent games.

(fwiw, ~2000 ELO at chess, ~3 kyu at Go. competent but unspectacular.)

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bediger
Amusingly, that page says it was last updated November 1996. It still renders
decently today, probably due to eschewing anything but the barest of HTML.

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wwortiz
Scroll down a bit more: Last modified: Monday, December 22, 2008

Maybe the text was last modified November 1996.

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chc
There's yet another "Last modified" date with a year of 2002. I think that
over its long history, the page has been through a few different layers of
CMS.

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mightybyte
Suicide, Atomic, and Crazyhouse are my favorite variants...although FICS's
wild/5 is also amusing.

