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If you've abandoned chess.com for lichess.org, you might be surprised to learn that chess.com now hosts 15 variants.

Is there any variant where both players play blind every other move or in the starting?

There's a 'fog of war' variant where you can only see the squares that a piece of yours could move to.

--that a piece of yours could attack, I believe, not move to

I just checked and if you want to be technical it's "move to normally, could move to during a capture if a piece was there, or holds a piece you could capture".

Pawns are the only case that where those three are different but they see all three:

- directly in front (move)

- forward-diagonal (normal attack)

- horizonal exactly only in the case of a enemy pawn moved to that square last turn that can be taken en-passant (capture). That square goes dark if you move another piece.

That one would be interesting to try with AlphaZero. Reinforcement learning systems tend to have trouble with imperfect information.

pychess.org has many chess variants, and you can play against the AI to try them out. No registration required.

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