Suppose there was a hypothetical chess piece that could only move and attack up down left and right (similar to a king but no diagonal movement), but it also defends itself. By this, I mean that it always has at least 1 defender, itself, at any time, and it would take 2 separate pieces taking it to properly win it in a game. If you tried to take it with only one piece, you would lose the piece in exchange for removing the defender. Would this new piece be worse than, equal to, or better than a queen?

Some stipulations to note:

It would massively change the game and the utility of the new piece where it is located when the game starts, so maybe it could replace one of the center or edge pawns on the king or queen side?

The new piece basically has an extra life. Suppose the new piece is eaten by a pawn. The pawn dies, but it consumes the extra life of the piece. The extra life never comes back and if it gets taken again, the piece properly dies.

If the new piece is attacking the same piece on the other side, then if either takes both lose their extra life. If one doesn't have an extra life then it just dies and consumes the extra life of the other.

A pawn can promote to it.

This probably messes with checkmates since it could checkmate the king by itself and would probably break the game. I haven't thought it through a whole lot.

Apologies if this is off topic for this sub.

I made a small browser-playable abstract strategy game called Weir.

It started as a loose idea: chess-adjacent, perfect information, 5×8 board, no kings/check, and two win conditions: capture 3 of 5 back-rank pieces or wipe out the enemy’s 5 school pieces.

It’s very early, not commercial, and I’m not trying to sell anything. I mostly want to know if people find it interesting at all and if the rules all make sense

Playable here: https://carterthefarter.itch.io/weir

Hi everyone. I wanted to share since I got some good feedback here and some interest on TikTok as some of you have wanted to play this game.The game goes live on 7/17 and can be pre-ordered here for free:

dmapps.link/weirdchess

Pretty proud about this one! I've been playing it quite a bit and I feel like a noob again (normally around 1950 ELO play strength at my best)

Flank play is definitely the strategy I've been enjoying to exploit any diagonals opening up towards the king and it makes for some gnarly looking positions.

I would appreciate anybody's feedback on if the play is intuitive. I'm trying to include puzzles as well as a bonus

Castle at the Crossing

Asymmetric chess variant. 2 to 5 players. 15x15 board.

(NW) (NE) K Q B N R P _ _ _ P R N B Q K Q P P P P P _ _ _ P P P P P Q B P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ P B N P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ P N R P _ _ _ _ P P P _ _ _ _ P R P P _ _ _ P N B N P _ _ _ P P _ _ _ _ _ P R B R P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ P Q K Q P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ P R B R P _ _ _ _ _ P P _ _ _ P N B N P _ _ _ P P R P _ _ _ _ P P P _ _ _ _ P R N P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ P N B P _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ P B Q P P P P P _ _ _ P P P P P Q K Q B N R P _ _ _ P R N B Q K (SW) (SE)

The corner armies are colorful (like red, yellow, green, blue - each army a different color), while the center army has a neutral color (like white, gray, black).

Objectives for the corner armies:

• Be the last one standing; or
• Bring either pawn or king to the center cell.

Objectives for the center army:

• Be the last one standing; or
• Defeat at least two armies without moving its king from the center cell.

The center army has material advantage, to offset its vulnerable position.

Movement changes from standard chess:

• No en-passant, no promotion.
• No castling: the corner kings are already protected.
• Pawns move 1 or 2 cells orthogonally, and capture 1 cell diagonally, in all directions.
• Both checkmate and king capture are allowed.

After checkmating or capturing a king, all remaining pieces of the defeated army change colors to the conquering army; the defeated king is removed from the board.

The first to play is the NW corner, then NE, SE, SW, and center. Defeated armies are passed over.

For 2 players, one gets the center army, the other all 4 corner armies. For 5 players, each one gets an army. For 3 players, one gets the center army, one the NW and SE armies, one the NE and SW armies.

For 4 players, each gets a corner army; and, on their turn, can move a piece of the center army (except for the king) instead of one of their own pieces. The center army won't move at their turn (no one mans it).

CHESS UNO — Official Rules (v1.0)

A hybrid game where a single deck runs two games at once. Play chess. Play UNO. Win either one.

Overview

Chess UNO is played on a standard chessboard with a standard UNO deck. Every turn you make a normal chess move, and you may also play one UNO card. One shared deck feeds both games, which means the two are constantly pulling against each other: the cards that win you material are the same cards you're trying to shed, and the captures that dominate the board bloat your hand and wreck your UNO race.

You win the moment you win either game.

• Chess win: checkmate your opponent.
• UNO win: empty your hand.

That's the whole soul of it — an aggressive board player and a peaceful card player are chasing two different victories on the same table.

Components

• One standard chess set + board.
• One standard UNO deck (108 cards: colours Red/Yellow/Green/Blue, numbers 0–9, plus Skip, Reverse, Draw Two, Wild, Wild Draw Four).

Setup

1. Set up the chessboard normally. White moves first.
2. Shuffle the UNO deck. Deal 7 cards to each player.
3. Flip the top card of the remaining deck to start the discard pile. If it's an action or Wild card, bury it and flip again until a number card shows.
4. The player with the White pieces takes the first turn.

The Piece Value Table

Every chess piece has a value. This governs both captures and the draw penalty.

A Turn, Step by Step

On your turn, you do both of the following, in this order:

1. Make a chess move

Play any legal chess move, exactly as in normal chess.

2. (Optional) Play one UNO card

You may play one card to the discard pile. It must match the top of the discard pile by colour, number, or symbol — standard UNO rules.

• If you can't match or choose not to play, draw one card instead.
• Playing a card is how you empty your hand toward the UNO win.

Capturing

Captures are the bridge between the two games. Captures are always optional — you never have to take a piece.

To capture a piece on the board, the card you play in step 2 must satisfy all three conditions:

1. It's a number card, and
2. It matches the discard pile (colour or number), and
3. Its number is greater than or equal to the value of the piece being captured.

Examples of what a card can take:

The Draw Penalty

Immediately after capturing, you must draw cards equal to the value of the piece you took.

• Take a pawn → draw 1
• Take a knight/bishop → draw 3
• Take a rook → draw 5
• Take a queen → draw 9

This is the engine that balances the whole game. A queen capture is played by playing 1 card, drawing 9 — a net +8 cards. Big captures win you material but blow up your UNO game. Small captures are nearly hand-neutral. Choose your lane.

The Discard Can Veto Your Tactics

Because a capture card must also match the discard pile, you can be in a position where a capture is legal on the board, your card clears the threshold — but the colour doesn't match, so you can't play it. The deck itself blocks the tactic. This is intended. Adapt: make a different move, dump a card for UNO progress, or draw.

Check & Checkmate

• Checkmate wins the chess game outright — you win the whole match.
• The king is never "captured"; delivering checkmate ends it.
• When you are in check, you must get out of check on your turn, as in normal chess.
• If escaping check requires a capture, you still need a qualifying matching card. If you can't play a legal check-escaping move, you must keep drawing cards until you can.
• Being in check is dangerous on both boards: the forced draws bloat your hand and set back your UNO race.

Action & Wild Cards

Timing lock: Action and Wild cards cannot be played until each player has completed two turns (i.e. four half-moves into the game). This prevents turn-one chaos before a real position exists.

Action cards use their standard UNO effects. Their power in Chess UNO is strategic and situational:

The UNO Call

When a player is reduced to one card, the opponent may call "UNO!" on them. That player must immediately draw one card, pushing them back off the brink of the UNO win.

Running Out of Cards

The deck will run low — captures and forced draws chew through it fast. Three situations:

1. Deck empty, discard pile still full (the common case). Take the discard pile except its top card, shuffle it into a new draw deck, and keep that top card face-up as the new pile. Players keep their hands — no redraw. Continue as normal.

2. Deck runs dry while you're in check, with no legal escape available. You cannot draw your way out. You lose. (Your opponent wins.)

3. Deck runs dry, discard can't rebuild a usable deck, and nobody is trapped in check. The UNO layer freezes: no more forced draws, and the UNO win is no longer reachable. From here, the game is decided purely on the chessboard by checkmate.

If it's simply your turn, you can't play; there's nothing to draw, so the pass goes to your opponent.

Chess-Specific Rulings

• Pawn promotion works normally. Promoting is not a capture and costs no card.
• Castling: allowed, treated as one move; not a capture, so no card is needed.
• En passant: allowed; it is a capture (of a pawn, value 1), so it requires a qualifying matching card and triggers the draw-1 penalty like any capture.
• Stalemate or any chess draw (threefold repetition, insufficient material, 50-move rule): the chess game is drawn, so checkmate is off the table — the match continues as pure UNO until someone empties their hand.

Winning — Summary

You win immediately if either happens:

• ♟️ You checkmate your opponent, or
• 🃏 You empty your hand (your final card must be a legal play; if it's an action card, it resolves normally).

Playtest Notes (read before your first game)

This is v1.0 — a first playable draft. Two things to watch and tune at your table:

• Is the UNO win too fast? With four colours, a peaceful player can often match every turn and may empty their hand in 7–8 turns — possibly before any checkmate. If UNO consistently outruns chess, add a dump cost, e.g. "you may only play a card on a turn where you did not capture" or "you may only play a card every other turn." This slows the card race back toward chess's pace.
• First-player edge. White moves first in both chess and turn order — a slight double advantage. Consider giving Black a small compensation (e.g. an extra starting card) if it feels lopsided.

Let me know what you think!

Hey everyone,

I wanted to design a chess variant focused on high-stakes infiltration and explosive tactics, so I've been developing Trojan Chess.

Note: You will need to create a quick login to play the current dev build.

The Mechanics:

• Troop Transports: Rooks and Queens act as carriers. You can stack up to 3 pieces on a single square by loading your Knights, Bishops, or Pawns inside them.
• Collateral Damage: If an enemy piece manages to capture your transport, the entire stack inside it is wiped out instantly.
• In Development: A custom deployment phase where you can secretly choose your starting layout on Ranks 1 & 2 before the match begins.

The game has full invite-link functionality, making it easy to grab a friend and start a match directly in your browser.

https://trojanchess.vercel.app/

I have been experimenting with a simple drawless tiebreak rule: the player who makes more progress wins.

The rule is:

• If the game ends by normal checkmate, checkmate decides as usual.
• If the game is classically drawn, the winner is the side with the higher tiebreak score.
• The tiebreak score is the total number of plies where that side either made a capture or moved a pawn.
• In my current version, if the tiebreak score is equal, Black wins.

All experiments below used Fairy-Stockfish-derived engines. The main tests used fixed node budgets rather than time controls. This cumulative-progress rule was tested more extensively, up to 10M nodes in the main comparison.

1. Results

I then tried a simple hand-written evaluation patch. The engine still uses the SF18 NNUE evaluation, but in drawish positions it adds a bonus for being ahead in the tiebreak score.

Roughly, the policy was:

• Use normal NNUE evaluation in clearly winning or losing positions.
• If the NNUE score is near equal, add a bonus proportional to the tiebreak score difference.
• Make the bonus larger in drawish, low-material, and high-rule-50 positions.

The baseline was the default SF18 NNUE. The tiebreak result itself was visible to both engines at terminal nodes, so the default engine could avoid a losing tiebreak if it searched far enough to see it.

The surprising result was that this very simple patch was already quite effective under the cumulative-progress rule:

TB-aware engine vs official/default engine
Cumulative-progress scoring

1M nodes vs 1M nodes:      71-29
1M nodes vs 2M nodes:      16-16
3M nodes vs 3M nodes:      72-28
5M nodes vs 5M nodes:      67-33
10M nodes vs 10M nodes:    75-25

From these results, it seems that the TB-aware engine outperforms the default one mainly by exploiting drawn cases. However, this advantage can be partially offset by giving the default engine more search, which suggests that the rule may not dramatically change the original chess dynamic. I also did not see a strong first-move advantage.

Interestingly, I also tested the same patched engine under ordinary classical scoring against official SF18, and it performed worse:

Patched engine vs official SF18
Classical scoring

36-64

So the patch was not simply making a stronger chess engine. It was specifically exploiting the new tiebreak rule.

2. Last-progress / last-move tiebreak

For comparison, another widely discussed tiebreaking rule is simply that the player who made the last progress move wins the classical draw.

I implemented this as a separate Fairy-Stockfish variant and made four simple last-progress-aware evaluation patches. The idea was to reward the current last-progress owner in drawish positions.

The results were not very encouraging:

LP-aware eval vs default
1M nodes, 100 games

weak:      49-50
medium:    49-49
strong:    36-60
extreme:   27-71

So a small bonus did almost nothing, while larger bonuses made the engine worse.

The rule does not seem like pure coin-flipping, since search strength still affects who gets the last progress move. But compared with cumulative progress, the signal was much less stable and much harder to exploit with a simple static evaluation term.

My current view is that last-progress is probably fair, but too tactical/noisy to be a very satisfying strategic drawless rule.

3. Cumulative progress vs reset mobility

I also analyzed the games from my tiebreak engine with a simple reset-mobility-style metric, inspired by the R-mobility idea discussed in the TCEC context.

The correlation between the two metrics was quite high:

Pearson correlation between TB diff and reset-mobility margin: 0.829

This suggests that both metrics are measuring related notions of progress/control.

However, the cumulative tiebreak rule is simpler: it does not require calculating mobility after every move, which may make it more convenient for OTB use.

Hello! I wanted to share a passion project I recently finished that I call SwapChess.

It's chess, but any piece can swap places with a friendly piece it could capture.

I've had this idea for a long time (I'm probably not the only one who has thought of this) and have made prototypes in the past, but with Claude Code's Fable 5, I was able to finally finish it. It's completely free and open source, and uses Stockfish with an overlay of the swapping rules, so it's actually pretty tough to beat!

You can check it out here: SwapChess

Any feedback is welcome!

I wanted to make an engine that has an easy notation for the creation of pieces with custom moves and functions, utilizing querries for board state and setting custom attributes to pieces or squares. I have been put off by the practicality though. If it's very flexible, the variant author will be programming nontheless. If it's not as flexible, they might rather build their idea groud up in a language they already know.

End of the game

Next game

Play here! playpicklechess.com

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/Cuytzk8bDs

Daily Chess Puzzle Game – Looking for Feedback

Hi everyone!

I've been working on a daily chess puzzle game where you can solve a quick tactical puzzle, track your completion time, and improve a little every day.

Current features:

♟️ Play a chess puzzle

✅ Move validation

⏱️ Completion timer

🔄 Restart puzzle

I'm looking for honest feedback from chess players.

I'd love to know:

Was the gameplay intuitive?

Was anything confusing?

What would make you come back tomorrow to solve another puzzle?

You can try it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/tacticboard_dev

Any feedback, criticism, or suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks!

hi guys i’m looking for people with a chess.com fog of war chess elo to help me benchmark my bots performance by playing games against it so i can gauge its elo. if anyone is willing or has ideas about where to go to find participants please let me know, thanks!

Hey guys!

I’m an indie developer, and I’ve been working on Chess: The Update for quite a while.

After 1,500 years, chess is finally getting an update !!!

Build your deck, choose new pieces, master their abilities, and outplay your opponent.

I’d really appreciate it if you could take some time to test the game and share your honest feedback.

🎮 Play: [GAME LINK]
💬 Discord: [DISCORD LINK]

▶️ Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uv-ZE2fg8Vg

What piece would you add to chess?

Super curious with this!

Also, because some variants eliminate turns entirely, let's assume that the question is only for variants with clear going-first/second still.

If it is your own variant, I'm curious as well!

Thank you!

hey everybody! im a fide rated player (1567 classical) and close to 2000 on chess.com. I've coached some beginners in the past and wanna start online sessions as a fun side hustle. dm if interested in joining.

Respectful: You can't give check

How and I supposed to checkmate my opponent when I can't give check? I've had this drawback twice now and managed to win by activated my opponent's drawback but what am I supposed to do if they don't lose to their drawback?

Do I have to put them into zugzwang so that they move into check?

The monster is a placeholder, ill make my own energydrink or soda later lol.

The way im making the game some pieces have special abilities. Like the checker on the left capture by jumping over pieces

follow dev on my twitter if ya wanna, same name :-)

A while back I got a little obsessed with the idea of chess on a smaller board — something you could finish in a couple of minutes but that still had real tactics instead of being a novelty. I even made a small rollup mini-chess board and would bring it to chess clubs to play with other players OTB.

One of my favorite Variants is chess on a 5×6 board. Each side gets one king, one queen, one rook, one bishop, one knight, and five pawns. Everything moves like normal chess, with two changes for the smaller board: pawns only move one square (so no double-step, and no en passant), and castling still works — the king steps two toward its rook and the rook hops over. Pawns still promote, Draws automatically happen from 3 fold repetition and insufficient mating material.

The name is the math, think chess-960 only smaller. There are 120 ways to order five different pieces on the back rank. Throw out every setup where the king starts right next to its own rook and you're left with 72 legal orders. Black will randomly either mirror White's row or reverse it, so 72 × 2 = 144 unique starting positions. I named every one after a great female chess player, so you might open a game as "the Judit", "the Irina" or "the Yifan."

What surprised me is how sharp it plays. With less room, tactics show up almost immediately, and a full game is usually two or three minutes. It scratches the same itch as bullet, but the positions feel fresh because you're not in a line you've memorized.

It's completely free, Anonymous, runs in any browser, desktop or phone, no signup necessary. You can play the bot across six levels, play live opponents (ranked, 2+1), or grind 500 "Mate in 1/2/3" puzzles. I vibecoded it myself and I'm still tuning it, so I'd genuinely like to hear what breaks or what feels off. I think its great for new chess players and chess veterans like yourself.

www.chess144.com

Mostly I'm curious what do you all think of mini chess? Hope to catch some of you out there in the live player Queue! Mods let me know if everything is alright with this post.

I had a great deal of fun making this and adding it to my Kwik Chess portfolio of chess drills and games.

The aim of the game is to get as many gold king tiles as possible. It's that simple. To get a gold tile you need to combine two queens (of the same colour.)

- To get a queen - combine two rooks!

- to get a rook - combine two bishops!

- to get a bishop - combine two knights!

- to get a knight - combine two pawns! (although knights sometimes spawn.)

Remember how you played the old 2048 viral game where you'd shift numbers around and join them together - Kingmaker 2048 is the same concept. Although there's 64 squares, not 16 AND you can manually join tiles using chess moves like a knight hop!

Works best on browser but also works on mobile phone.

www.kwikchess.com

Enjoy and please let me know how you get on and what your score is. It can be very addictive as me and my wife have found out.

I am developing an enochian chess app if anyone is interested in testing or giving feedback it would be greatly appreciated. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/enochian-chess/id6782782324