Check Pistols - Anarchy in the Chessboard

October 12, 2022 10:27 AM

/r/AnarchyChess. "Introducing Bbishop: It grew extra tentacles so it can bounce against the sides of the board and other friendly pieces." The Priest. The Anti-Queen. The Knook.
posted by MollyRealized (19 comments total)

The Butt Plug Gambit sounds like the best ever String Cheese Incident cover band in Denton.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:36 AM on October 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is amazing.
posted by gauche at 10:55 AM on October 12, 2022

It's good to see that one of my favorite sites from the early internet is still alive and kicking: https://www.chessvariants.com/ I imagine some digging would find a lot of these joke pieces actually considered more seriously as fairy pieces. Probably not the BI-shop, however.
posted by 3j0hn at 11:11 AM on October 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm reminded of this exchange in an early episode of Futurama:

Leela: Face it, Fry, baseball was as boring as mom and apple pie. That's why they jazzed it up.

Fry: Boring? Baseball wasn't... hmm, so they finally jazzed it up?

So they finally jazzed up chess...
posted by RonButNotStupid at 11:24 AM on October 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of a chess variant my kids came up with - Narrative Chess. Any move is possible, however each individual move must be supported by clear narrative motivations based upon relationships with the board and other pieces. Characters (eg pieces) start with traditional rules and develop new motivations and abilities over time.
posted by q*ben at 11:32 AM on October 12, 2022 [25 favorites]

I absolutely did this kind of thing when I was a kid. I had a book that introduced a few "variants" on the main game, and when I realized that I was never gonna be able to hang with the grandmasters in the real game, I quickly took up the mantle of creating my own weird variations. My favorite by far was the one where you added two extra rows and columns to the board, and added a second king and queen (with commensurate pawns in the second column) to both sides. First side to capture either opposing king wins. This has the effect of turning the game into a mad scrabble of materiel sacrifice, wherein you sustain unimaginable losses to your own pieces in hopes of slipping a piece past the front line of pawns and somehow forking both enemy kings. I quickly became dominant, and immediately ran out of people to play against because why would you ever play a chess-like game with the 10-year-old who invented it? More than once, that is?

I was not a popular 4th grader, is what I'm saying.
posted by Mayor West at 11:39 AM on October 12, 2022 [14 favorites]

Any chance this recent flurry of ideas was inspired by chess.com's rollout of Duck Chess?
posted by clawsoon at 11:41 AM on October 12, 2022 [7 favorites]

Of course now, 30 years later, I'm belatedly realizing that I stumbled onto a principle that some people use in tournament play, positional sacrifice, and probably could have used it to trounce anyone in the middle-school chess club, but was far too busy being weird to actually apply it to the real game.
posted by Mayor West at 11:45 AM on October 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Incidentally, it was only this week that I learned about Kung Fu Chess. Real-time, and you can move as many pieces as you want whenever you want, but after moving each piece has a 10-second cooldown before it can move again.
posted by jackbishop at 1:02 PM on October 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Someone I knew in high school invented a chess variant called "Castle." Same board and movements, same goal to checkmate the opposing king, but with 2 rules: 1) No capturing of pieces, and 2) you could "castle" any two pieces as long as there were two empty spaces between them, vertically or horizontally. Oh, and that included castling one of your pieces and one of the opponents. Since all the pieces remained on the board throughout, it turned into like a competitive jigsaw puzzle, and about half the games ended in stalemate; clever castling was the key to victory.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:06 PM on October 12, 2022

Now I really want a chess set where one color is all the standard pieces and the other is all of these wacky fairy chess creations.

This is petty and unfair of me, but I still hold a grudge against chess for castling. I was a young kid just learning how to play and one day one of my opponents at school castled their king and rook. I was ignorant and it just seemed like such a made up thing (so you're saying in this one instance, which is HIGHLY BENEFICIAL TO YOU, the king and the rook can simultaneously move? HOW CONVENIENT!) and I completely lost all interest in chess, which was also a little unfair of me because chess doesn't have that many weird moves (en passant is the only other one?) and it's not like castling hasn't been around for hundreds of years.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 2:14 PM on October 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Now I really want a chess set where one color is all the standard pieces and the other is all of these wacky fairy chess creations.

Now I know you aren't looking for a carefully balanced game designed by a GM, but Chess with Different Armies designed by Ralph Betza pits three new balanced, themed, "teams" of pieces against the standard FIDE chess "team".
posted by 3j0hn at 2:27 PM on October 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

If you're looking for more games that are chess bent to your wildest whims, especially for those who love indie RPGs, I recommend Fake Chess.
posted by Inkslinger at 2:59 PM on October 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

Given that chess is, if not actually solved at least solved-ish, I think some changes could be revitalizing.

The problem with chess is that it's a game where it's been optimized and analyzed until all the fun is gone. You made a move? Some person back in 1596 already thought of it and came up with the perfect response. Victory is attained largely by memorizing ancient texts.

Add a new piece! Change the board size! Shake things up!

Mind, this is all coming from the perspective of a person who is VERY bad at chess. Like, shockingly bad. I'm like a -500 player on any of the chess ranking systems, and they only go to zero. So my opinion should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

But I do think it's neat that people are trying new things with an old game.
posted by sotonohito at 6:26 PM on October 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

I have both sets of Knightmare Chess cards, but really nobody to play chess with anymore on any kind of regular basis.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 7:25 PM on October 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

Should win for best title!
posted by blue shadows at 11:15 PM on October 12, 2022

chess is best played between people who can think ahead a little way but have not memorised a thousand opening books
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:31 AM on October 13, 2022

My mind immediately leapt to 20020's Illinois chess, of course. BRB, building a Consortium!
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 3:53 AM on October 13, 2022

I loved when they did The Game.

Top comment picks the next move, legal or not. Day 8: 4. White buys a hotel on e5, abcdfgh3.
posted by charred husk at 8:21 PM on October 13, 2022