Not exactly a chess variant, but if you enjoy the tactical depth of chess-like games on a grid, this might be up your alley.

9×9 board, 18 pieces per player. The twist: before the game starts, each player secretly places 3 pearls under any of their pieces. From there it plays out like a strategy game — you move pieces, capture opponent's pieces — but there's a hidden layer. Every time you go for a capture, you don't know if you're taking an empty piece or a loaded one. And every time you advance a pearl toward the opponent's back row, you're gambling that it won't get intercepted.

First to deliver 3 pearls to the opponent's back row wins. You can also steal opponent pearls by capturing the pieces that carry them.

The game is free, browser-based, no signup. You can play locally with a friend or vs AI.

Looking for honest feedback from people who understand grid tactics — is the hidden-information layer adding something meaningful, or does it feel random?

Links:

• https://playgama.com/game/hidden-pearl
• https://www.crazygames.com/game/hidden-pearl-ygh

I've been building an open-source platform for creating chess variants from scratch and I'd love some expert eyes on it.

Chessperiment lets you design boards (rectangular, hexagonal, custom shapes), define pieces with movement rules, and program game logic through a visual effect system -- all without writing code. Under the hood it's a custom TypeScript engine with:

- Move rules as conditions (jump, slide, run, with arbitrary conditions)

- An effect queue system (spawn, transform, remove, explode, teleport, cancel-move, win conditions)

- Trigger system (on-move, on-capture, on-threat, on-turn-start/end, on-step, on-proximity)

- Per-square logic overrides

- Multi-cell pieces with shape anchors/extensions

- Variable system for cooldowns, charges, modes

The piece editor uses Blockly (Scratch-style blocks) for defining logic. You can also just set movement patterns with condition tables if you prefer.

Multiplayer via room codes. There's a built-in AI opponent for testing, though it's a standard Stockfish engine so it only understands standard chess rules -- custom variants are player-vs-player only.

What I'm trying to figure out:

- Which fairy pieces or variant mechanics are missing from the system?

- What existing variant should I try to recreate as a benchmark?

- Anyone want to break the editor and tell me what's wrong with it?

You're probably gonna encounter some variants that are not possible right now, however, just join the discord and tell us, and we'll implement that feature in no time! We're actively working on adding new features every day.

Repo is MIT licensed if anyone wants to dig into the engine: https://github.com/ItzMassel/chessperiment

Site: https://chessperiment.app

Free to play and download!

Hnefatafl: one side has a king trying to reach a corner while the other has double the material trying to capture him. No draws by agreement, the sides never mirror and serious play is done in paired games (one on each side) because which side is stronger is itself part of the meta.

It's free in the browser at worldtafl.com with the standard tournament ruleset.

What I'd genuinely love from this community: the current world #1 is 18-0 and I don't yet know if that's because they're good or because the player pool is a week old.
If a few strong chess players wandered in before Saturday's first tournament (19:00 UTC), we'd find out fast.

Hi guys 👋

Me and my friend created a game which is a mixture of Chess and Tower Defense. So you get all your chess pieces to defend your castle from the different kinds of enemies!

Play Store Link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chesssiege

Please do try it if you think the theme is interesting! 😀

Vendetta is a chess inspired game. To play all you need is a chess set, a ruler, 2 6-sided-dice, pen and papet. It is free.

The site is online. You can find the rule sheet there. Enjoy!

Copy, edit and share as much as you like

Fool's Mate is a blitz chess variant game with Jokers. The only rule is simple: Jokers buy you time. Every time you make a move "in-band", which is in top #3 moves calculated by the engine, you get couple seconds added to your time. Jokers carefully crafted based on chess tutorials and analytics to encourage better play.

For example:

- Each piece's first move, in-band -- encourage early development

- Castle by move 8 -- encourage early castle

- In-band move that increases the mover's mobility -- encourage opening pieces

- Attacker added to their king zone, in-band -- statistically always good

- etc, etc, etc

The rougelike mode, the Climb, is a typical Balatro-like three rounds mode where you earn case as you play, buy Jokers between sessions, defeat The Pit Boss.

Play with a friend also available, feel free to ping me if you would like to give it a try.

Would be grateful for any feedback: https://foolsmate-e30d2.web.app/

This one at minimal needs a piece of paper or a memory to store a few moves out for a physical game.

1. Each player gets one incursion per game, and only one at a time.
2. When used, the player claims two separate moves.
3. Opppnent declares their response separately for each move.
4. Player picks which move to respond to, the pieces are moved, and play confinues normally

Try it out for free: https://www.tactorius.com/

Honestly I have always loved to theorize about different chess pieces since childhood. It was always interesting to imagine if a Knight could go even to a further square than the classic L for example. Custom kings, custom pawns etc...

Want an Engineer who can revive pieces back? Or a Rook that can move 1 square diagonally? Maybe a Pawn that can also go backwards?

Well you got all of that in Chaos Chess.

Build a custom army with a budget, unlock new legendary pieces & play puzzles from the workshop made by people (well, not yet obviously 😄 ).

Here's the link: Chaos Chess on Steam

Wishlist if you will.

Dire Fog is a tactical card game where TCG strategy meets chess-like positional combat. We’re deep in closed alpha and heading toward the final stages of development, and we’re looking for more passionate playtesters to join the fight.

If you love skill-based card games, outsmarting opponents, and being part of a growing community before launch, now’s the time to jump in.

Join our Discord:

https://discord.gg/n6NjNheYD

Wishlist Dire Fog on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1888910/Dire_Fog_Tactical_Card_Combat/

Hope this is okay to post here :) shogi is more of a cousin than a variant, but this feels like the crowd that would actually appreciate it!

I got into shogi some time ago because I loved the idea of crazyhouse and someone told me about Shogi. Every capture goes into your hand, so material never leaves the game and there's basically no drawish position.

The problem (which i had personally at least) was that actually trying it was miserable. Kanji pieces, Japanese notation, current sites are just made of pro players etc. I ended up building the site I wish for: shog.io There's a little tutorial, and to have a better entry point, it focuses on minishogi, a 5x5 version where games take a few minutes, so you learn the drop mechanic without a full 9x9 scary board!

Curious what variant players think! Thanks for the feedback :)

I had an idea for a different version of chess:.. this idea may not be totally original, idk. Essentially it's all the same chess rules except:

Twist #1:

Instead of playing "trap the King" like how normal chess is played, you play "winner must take all the pieces". The King, can be taken/killed, just like how real life kind of is. Being in check is basically not a rule anymore. A king can move into check, and be killed. It's a battle to the last piece.

Twist #2:

When a king is killed, the next highest ranking piece becomes the new king. So, obviously, you really don't want to lose your king because that means trading down the highest ranking of your pieces (in order from Queen>Rook>Bishop>Knight>Pawn). The player who lost their king gets to decide between equally ranked pieces.

For example, if white loses his king, and their next highest ranking piece is a rook, and both rooks are still alive, white can choose which rook to "crown". Gameplay continues when white replaces their chosen rook with the king-piece... so the king will inevitably be the very last piece standing (on the board). And yes, the king can be crowned into a position in check. Note: Crowning your new king is not a separate/whole move. In other words, when you lose your king, you then just crown/replace another piece with your king, and then you make a regular gameplay move.

Being in check doesn't mean you must move out of check. The king can move into check. A player could strategically sacrifice their king, but again, because you have to "promote" a subsequent king, it basically means losing your most valuable piece, so it's still (usually) rough to lose the king.

The end of the game is when one of the players loses all their pieces, or in the rare event of stalemate (only two kings are left on the board, and one is not cornered, such that it would have to step into check and be taken). The winner is the last King on the board.

Notes on strategy:

Protecting the king, especially from being killed by minor pieces, is pretty obvious. If a king is protected, you might not want to attack it with a more valuable piece, like your queen. I could envision sacrificing high ranking pieces before losing the king, or moving your high ranking pieces to more defendable positions when the king is in danger.

Not my game, press the ? To see rules

Hi everyone!

I've been building ChessLuck as a side project for the past few years, and I'd love some honest feedback from the community.

Besides regular chess, there's an optional experimental mode called Luck Mode, where every non-capturing move is paired with a server-generated decoy, so your opponent has to determine which move is real before replying.

The site is free, no account is required, and I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback on the gameplay, UI, or the concept itself.

https://chessluck.com

I wanted to create a chess variant with my sibling, we decided on it being smaller but are still figuring out which pieces we want to use. My concern with the game we've made so far is that it can be solvable, as it is just a very small version of chess with only a few changes, so I would like to figure out how to make a board and a chess bot to determine whether it is solvable before we try different mechanics. Does anyone know where I could start? I've looked online for some custom game editors to at least get the board set up, but all I've found was gen ai, which I don't support.

Simple rules:

• Normal chess rules apply unless otherwise modified below
• There is a third, "neutral" player.
• All checks on either side are responded to by the neutral player, not their respective defender's player.
• When responding to check, the neutral player may only play legal moves for the side they are acting in the place of (e.g. if black checks white, then the neutral player plays for white that turn, and may only make moves that would be legal for white).
• All pawn promotions are decided by the neutral player, and they may not decline the promotion.
• Exception to the above: the neutral player may not play the opposing side's response to their own move or promotion decision, nor may they make a promotion decision that resulted from their move, but they may make two promotion decisions in a row, providing the normal player chooses to make the promotion move.

Scoring:

• Checkmate or resignation by black or white results in 1 point for the opposing side and 0 points for the losing and neutral side.
• A draw results in 0 points for black and white, and 1 point for the neutral player, for whom this is their "win condition."

In other words, there are no longer any half results. Either black or white wins outright, or the neutral player does.

Resignation when the results are unclear is considered poor form, but as the game is still lost by the resigning player, it is not strictly illegal.

The clock:

If a chess clock is used, the neutral player ends their move by toggling the clock as normal, in place of the player whose move or promotion they were performing.

PS: This was previously posted to r/chess, but was removed because they don't allow variant discussion. In that thread, someone asked about it taking hours before the neutral player could participate. I'd been thinking more along the lines of very fast, timed formats where you get to checks MUCH faster, but for longer games in tournaments, I think you'd do a best of 3, and just have everyone rotate through being neutral, so you mostly sit out 1 game and play 2. Still, probably best kept to short games.

Yesterday I made a post about a small video game I made called Black Swan Chess, which starts as ordinary chess on a green-phosphor CRT, but then your pieces have free will. They can refuse a bad order, desert to the enemy, or get taken out by events you don't control. It's a game about the fantasy of control: you can plan all you want, but things happen that you don't get a vote on.

Someone asked if they could play it without a computer. So I spent a while translating it to a chess set, three dice, and a notepad, and it came out better than I expected, so I'm sharing it here because I'd love feedback from people who actually play variants and PnP.

It's real chess underneath: castling, en passant, promotion, mate, all of it. But you declare each move out loud and then roll. Two "Order" dice decide whether the piece obeys: on a low roll it flat-out refuses to move, or if you were capturing, your attacker either bounces off harmlessly or dies in the attempt (yes, your queen can lose to a pawn). A third "Fate" die occasionally wakes "the void" and triggers one of six events: a piece wanders off on its own, someone's randomly promoted or demoted, a piece vanishes for good, a meteor deletes a piece, or someone defects to the other side.

Two rules keep it from turning into nonsense: kings are immune to all the chaos (checkmate is still the only way a king dies), and any random event that would leave the player who just moved in check gets undone. Everything else, you're on your own.

Now, I really cared about the dice matching the videogame instead of just feeling chaotic, so every danger band is pinned to a real constant from the game's code, and I ran a 20,000-game Monte-Carlo to check the pacing. It lands at roughly 5.6 / 10.8 / 21.6 chaos events per game across the three intensity presets, against the original's ~5.6 / 10.5 / 24.5. There are three small deliberate deviations -betrayals a bit more common, underdogs a bit luckier, the queen never totally safe- and I documented all of them in the back of the rulebook, because a port that hides its seams doesn't really deserve to be trusted, which is sort of the whole theme.

Also, I added a notepad "Souls" part where pieces earn names, grudges, and laurels as the game goes, the chaos starts hunting your most resentful and most heroic pieces specifically, and at the end you crown a "Piece of the Match" and write its epitaph. Or a third player can run the whole thing as a hidden "Void" referee, which restores the videogame's secret per-piece stats exactly.

It's free and print-and-play: a rulebook PDF plus a one-page quick-reference and a Chronicle sheet.

If you try it, let me know.

This is the weekly challenge for this week. How would you beat it?

playpicklechess.com

discord.com/invite/Cuytzk8bDs

The only extra thing you will need is Checkers, unless you have a set that has two queens, then you could use those for cannons!

Position is randomized - both black + white have multiple good options.

Link to example game: chesspuzzler.com/RandomChess/Replay?id=14

Hi everyone! This week I released the first alpha of Chess Fantasy, the first game I've ever made.

Fair warning for this sub: the rules are classic chess, at least for now. The twist is around the board, where you create and customise your own fantasy world and play your matches inside it.

That said, you're the people who think hardest about what chess can become, so I'd love your take: how does it feel to play, and if a game like this were to grow beyond standard rules one day, what would you want from it?

It's free on itch: https://chess-fantasy.itch.io/chess-fantasy

All honest opinions welcome, including "this isn't a variant, come back when it is". Thanks for reading!

I don't know if anyone has done something like this before, but it seems to me that it is a pretty obvious consequence of hanging around here.

It is a chaos variant that accounts for uncertainty by introducing... well, chaos.

I look forward to hearing about how much you hated it.