It's Critter Time!

Ever since I was in kindergarten, chess has always been one of my favorite board games, but it gets stale after a while. More recently, I've gotten into fairy chess, with alternative rules such as extra pieces, different board shapes and sizes, new ways to move and more. I'm making this thread to discuss such variants with people!

Some variants that I've enjoyed recently:

• 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel
• Musketeer Chess
• Xiangqi (Chinese chess)
• Sovereign Chess
• Faerie Chess (by Brybelly Games)

Additionally, I wanted to make a variant of my own, so last year (this was originally posted on Cohost), I created Overload Chess (formerly known as Deicide Chess, but the name has been changed to be more culturally sensitive). It's played on a 16x16 board and features 25 different piece types, ranging from ordinary pieces like the Bishop and Knight, to fusion pieces like the Chancellor, to entirely new ones such as the Time Machine and Sumo Wrestler. (I archived the rules to Overload Chess on my Neocities. You can view them here.)

d: fairy chess, and especially fairy chess pieces, has/have been super interesting to us for a while! we haven't had many chances to play with other people, but we did make our own variant a couple years back (and then promptly forget to publish it anywhere for a year x_x). idr if we posted much about it on our cohost at the time, but we put the rules and everything up on our site here

j: your variant looks really cool! we like all the original pieces, they seem like they'd be really fun to mess with!

dime wrote: Sun Jul 27, 2025 1:14 am d: fairy chess, and especially fairy chess pieces, has/have been super interesting to us for a while! we haven't had many chances to play with other people, but we did make our own variant a couple years back (and then promptly forget to publish it anywhere for a year x_x). idr if we posted much about it on our cohost at the time, but we put the rules and everything up on our site here

j: your variant looks really cool! we like all the original pieces, they seem like they'd be really fun to mess with!

Thank you!! Your variant looks pretty cool too~

After making this, I also started brainstorming for a chess-based RPG called Caissa's Crusaders, which uses a system not unlike tabletop wargames, where each player gets one Royal piece (the classic example being the King, but there are also other choices such as the Dictator, Theocrat, Shogun, President, and Pharaoh) and 15 non-Royal pieces. I'm planning to have over 150 pieces included, ranging from all the ones in Overload Chess to several completely new ones, such as the Pie (moves like a Queen, but every time it captures, it can never move in the direction it took to capture again), the Snowman (freezes pieces by throwing snowballs at them), the Merchant (generates Checkers, the game's currency unit, every time it's moved) and the Ziggurat (I saw this one in a dream; it moves like a Rook, but can also make any number of 2-square orthogonal jumps in the same direction). Also, Checkers are used as the game's currency because they're shaped like coins and also are board game pieces.
I wanted the plot to be some kind of deconstruction of what a sentient chess piece would actually feel. How would they feel to have their identity in life literally injection-molded into them? Humans are free to choose our own lot in life, but a chess piece will always be that chess piece for its entire life. But also, there's a whole thing where the main bad guys are this organization of chess terrorists who want to steal people's souls and trap them in chess pieces or something. You know, standard Yu-Gi-Oh-esque plot points.

Lastly, I made a mockup of the title screen, which you can view here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1140345599/fullscreen/