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Comment by breuleux | Hacker News Reader

I had an idea for a chess variant recently that I haven't had time to test yet (but maybe it already exists?): it's exactly the same as normal chess, except on your turn you can move any piece, black or white, even your opponent's king (God chess?) You still have to eliminate the other king, and a piece can still only take pieces of the opposed color, obviously. I suppose it very well might turn out to be completely awful, but in my head it sounds interesting.

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My idea for a chess variant was giving every piece a fixed number of moves (with move-count visible at all times). After the quota of moves is finished, the piece becomes immobile except that it can still capture an enemy piece (and thus move to the captured square).

Sounds interesting! It could be played easily on a physical board by putting poker chips under the pieces. Without a way to replenish counts there is a risk of deadlock, though. Maybe an option to pass to recover one move on a piece of your choice?

I hadn't thought that far! The poker chips are a great idea. Perhaps a reset mechanism after both sides run out of moves would work too.

Somehow this reminded me of a football variant (soccer for americans) that has two balls in play, either ball is good as the other.

I wondered about this recently and assumed one reason this sort of thing doesn't catch on for mainstream sports like football (soccer) or basketball is because it'd be a mess to spectate/broadcast. Sounds fun though!

Incidentally there seems to be a chess/draughts like game rather inspired by football, called Diabolik.

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

> but in my head it sounds interesting.

It really does sound interesting to me as well. I suggest you grab a friend or random chess-playing stranger and challenge them to a game of "God-mode chess".

One jerk move possible - just undo the other player's move the moment that becomes possible (pawns can't move backwards, for example).

This seems like it'd degenerate into "pawn moves only", since you can immediately undo any other move.

Captures cannot be undone either, but yes, that might be a problem. Go solves it with the ko/superko rule that states it is illegal to move in such a way to reproduce a previous configuration of the board, and I think the same rule would be relevant here.

Edit: another simple solution (with interesting strategic implications) could be to forbid moving the same piece twice in a row.

The best way to solve this is to say that you can't move a piece right back to where it just came from, like the ko rule in Go. As for superko, I think the threefold rule works just fine.

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