Ask HN: Can we brainstorm a new chess style? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can we brainstorm a new chess style?

3 pointsatlasunshrugged5 comments

I've always enjoyed chess but when I was in the office today, a colleague had the NFL draft up on the screen and we started talking about economics and budgets for major league teams. What if there was a style of chess where instead of each team starting with equal pieces, each type of piece was assigned a value (e.g. pawn= 2, queen = 50, rook = 10) and each player gets a set number of points (e.g. 100 total) which they could use to spend on any piece they wanted and everyone of course has a king. So someone could end up starting a game with a queen, 4 rooks, and 5 pawns. I know this is a bit of a silly idea but thought it might be a fun twist on an old game and lend a new dimension to how people optimize their strategies.

It's fun to think about different ways to play chess. Point- and deck-build systems are pretty interesting.

I also like explosion mechanics, like your for example you could say that any one piece can keep moving (or move up to N times) as long as it keeps capturing. Similar to exploding dice, where after rolling 6 on a d6 you can roll again and add to your total, rerolling as long as you roll 6 again.

Another one that could be interesting is a motivational or morale advantage, where let's say that if you capture an opponent's piece, another one of your pieces gets a free move (due to high morale on your side).

I'll also confess that I enjoy turning chess into a dice-based war game at times :-)

Nice idea for a post.

Your value for the queen is too high. There are a few "standard" tables of chess pieces values https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_piece_relative_value As you can see, everyone has a slightly different opinion. Note that this numbers are useful as a very rough estimation of the position.

You've seen

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess

?

I've thought about a variant of chess where people get the two sides of the board randomized differently.

Also this

http://reallybadchess.com/

The latter contains a chess engine which works for generic positions that don't arise is normal chess.

BoardGameGeek has quite a few chess variants:

https://boardgamegeek.com/wiki/page/Chess_Games

Sounds like Poker Chess (or Choker)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVx8l0y8rGI

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