What are the other variants of chess and how do you play it

Chess variants usually start with the basic chess starting pos. but the rules bended. Like 3 check, if you check your opponent 3 times, tou win.

or KOTH (king of the hill) if you get your king to the middle 4 squares of the board.

Chess 960 is a bit different, the pawns are the same but the pieces Inn the back row are random

Carzyhouse is a bit different as well if you capture a piece you can drop it. I will explain more when I get on the computer. I am on the phone right now.

To start with, chess has not always been played according to the rules we use today. So there are many historic variants, such as Chaturanga and Shatranj (Arabic Chess), both without Pawn double push or castling, with a Queen that could step one square diagonally, and Bishops that would only jump2 squares diagonally. In the middle ages there also was Courier Chess, on a 12x8 board, which combined the old Shatranj pieces with modern Bishops and a medieval Queen (moving as King).

Then chess did not evolve in the same direction everywhere, so today there are several 'regional variants', each played by millions of people in the countries where they dominate. Thus we have Xiangqi (Chinese Chess, 9x10), Shogi(Japanese Chess, 9x9), Makruk (Thai Chess, 8x8), mostly with very different pieces. These regions often have their own historic variants; there are many Shogi variants, some more that 1000 years old, on boards of sizes 12x12 to 25x25.

Then there are variants that were proposed as improvements over the then dominant form of chess, but never succeeded in replacing the latter, although they became reasonably popular, Such as Capablanca Chess (on a 10x8 board with B+N and R+N compound pieces). Finally there zillions of variants that people design as a hobby, just to try out different ideas. See for instace the website http://www.chessvariants.com .

Note that the mayhematics page is totally obsolete. It does not even mention WinBoard/XBoard, the number one free GUI for Chess variants, or any of the many chess-variant engines available for it. Or the Variant ICS. Last addition to the page is from 2006, and many of the links are dead.

I think it would be better to modernise chessvariants.org. It's the place for chess variants, but the site shows its age. It would be awesome if it could be converted to MediaWiki and some quality control applied to the entries.

You will not get two people to look at every article though, there's simply too much there and too few people to do that.

I agree with Evert. Books are no longer of this age. Information is shared through the web, as interactive media rather than passive text. This is why I started developing the 'Interactive Diagram' as a convenient and flexible method for describing Chess variants. I still plan to equip it with engine functionality, so that apart from using it to explain in a compact way how pieces move, it could also be a sparring partner that people could use to get a feel for what the game is about.

Ideally every article about a Chess variant would have an interactive diagram in it. In the 4th quarter of last year I already made interactive diagrams for many of the more interesting variants. But the best I can do with articles that are not my own is post them as comment to the article. As such comments also appear on the general comments page, and the diagram script only allows a single diagram per page, I had wait for 24other comments to push a diagram off the page, so I could post a new one.

Unfortunately the website is starting to look more and more like an advertizement board, and interesting content like the comments are now pushed down so far by annoying ads that virtually no one will see them.

Of course we can build our own website, as a sort of shadow site to chessvariants.org, where we describe variants presented in the latter in our own format.

I'm confused.

Pritchard didn't make the chessvariants.org website, so how come his daughter is in charge?

What is really needed, in terms of enabling people to play chess variants, is not only a good explanation of the rules, but also some pointers on strategy, starting with the relative value of pieces. That information is usually very hard to find, if available at all.

Personally I love books, as a reference work (I'd like to write one too, but I just don't have the time). They're not the best way to reach a large contemporary audience, however. At the very least you want a book with supplementary on-line support (puzzles, references, on-line play) and something you can browse and search easily.