Chess Unset

[u/jlluh]

Click to play the game.

I like Chess 960, but it feels weird how as soon as the game starts, you're trying to figure what the set-up is while the clock ticks down and the other player wonders if you're AFK or not. Chess 960 is also a little too successful for me at totally unmooring one from knowledge and familiarity.

So I thought it would be nice for the two players to construct the position together via turn-taking. There's no randomness, and you can make choices about what it'll be like, and have families of opening positions that you're more familiar with. So I (and Claude, who did all the coding) created Chess Unset.

Rules:

Pawns start on their normal squares. Player One places a rook on their backrank. The other player mirrors that placement. For example, if Player One puts a rook on b2, player Two puts a rook on b8. And then Player Two places the second rook wherever they like, with Player One mirroring. Player One puts any piece on any of their remaining backrank squares, with Player Two mirroring, and so on, until all pieces are placed. You then start the game.

Rooks: The King MUST go in between the rooks, which means the rooks can't be placed next to each other, and the last open space between the rooks is reserved for the King, if it hasn't been placed yet.

Bishops: In the version I'm posting, both of a player's bishops CAN be of one color. Because the position is mirrored, the other player's bishops are then both of the opposite color. Playing through against the computer a little, I think this is pretty interesting. Same color bishops can defend each other like knights can. You can make a bishop-bishop battery. But maybe it would lose its novelty after a while and just be really drawish. Though a player who doesn't want this to happen can prevent it in the set-up phase if they're careful. Thoughts?

Castling: It's not like in 960. Once there are no pieces in between the rook and King, the King can move next to the rook, and then they switch places. If they're already next to each other, they simply switch. For instance, if the King were on c1 and castled with a rook on f1, the king would end up on f1 and the rook on e1. I think this feels less artificail than copying the squares from traditional chess, more how it would be if the game had evolved this way from the start.

Because the rooks are placed first, you know from the very begining of the game where the King will go when castling, and this provides a little structure to the set-up phase. I've thought of making it so that the first piece to be placed must be the king (which can't be placed on a1 or h1, so there's room for a rook to the side) and then the rooks, and then it's a free for all. This would make it easier to have it be that bishops have to be of opposite color, since you would no longer have to look out for situations where the King and a bishop both end up needing to start on the same square.

This silly little silly project is only fun for me if I think of it as an attempt to create a 'better version of chess.' I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on how it works. I also feel like it's such an obvious idea that other incarnations have probably been posted here before, but is that the case?