My high-school crowd tried four chess variants for a while. One was Ultimate, where most of the pieces had different moves from the usual game. For example, the queen became the Retractor (aka Withdrawer), and it captured by moving away from the victim piece. The second (Giveaway) was played with pieces having their usual moves, but the objective was to have all your pieces captured. Like checkers, if you had a capturing move, you must make it (or one of them, your choice). The King had no special status; Pawns always promoted to Queens. The third was similar to an earlier thread: Black begins with his usual forces, but White has only a King and the four central pawns. But White gets two moves for every single Black move. When applicable, White was required to escape check on his first move, and I don't think he was allowed to move through check. This turns out to be an easy win for White; starting with only three pawns makes it more interesting. The fourth was Escalation: Start from the usual position. White gets one move, Black two, White three, Black four, etc. Checkmate was by position, at the end of a turn. I.e., if White is in check at the start of his turn, he must escape on the first move. I don't recall the rule on moving through check. Games of Escalation were very short. We also tried Kriegspiel, but found it boring. Rich ---- Quoting Guy Haworth <g.haworth@reading.ac.uk>:

The two-phase chess 'game' seems to less than well defined, and - as far as it is defined - seems to be a puzzle rather than a game as there is only one results ... 'draw'.

Losing Chess, which prioritises losing and capturing men, is perhaps the nearest in concept.

There are various variants of it, but recent work on the mainline version of Losing Chess (ICGA Journal, Vol. 37-2 (2014) ) indicates that 1.e3 is a win for White.

Guy

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