I’ve been wondering if there is a way to change chess so that AI is no longer the obvious winner. Chess itself went through a variety of rule changes throughout its history, so this wouldn’t be completely novel.

Off the top of my head - somehow creating new rules, especially socially-dependent or open-ended ones, on demand might work.

I asked a similar question a few months ago and got some interesting answers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441073

Otherwise, I really liked this chess variant, although it seems near impossible to actually play:

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

Alice chess is a chess variant invented in 1953 by V. R. Parton which employs two chessboards rather than one,[a] and a slight (but significant) alteration to the standard rules of chess. The game is named after the main character "Alice" in Lewis Carroll's work Through the Looking-Glass, where transport through the mirror into an alternate world is portrayed on the chessboards by the after-move transfer of chess pieces between boards A and B.